Michael Burrows, FRS (born 1963) is a British computer scientist, one of the creators of

AltaVista AltaVista was a web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

, and co-author of the paper that first described the Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Born in Britain, as of 2018 he lives in the United States, although he remains a British citizen.

Education

Burrows studied

Electronic Engineering Electronic engineering is a sub-discipline of electrical engineering that emerged in the early 20th century and is distinguished by the additional use of active components such as semiconductor devices to amplify and control electric current flo ...

with

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

and then completed his PhD in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he was a postgraduate student of

Churchill College, Cambridge Churchill College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. It has a primary focus on science, engineering and technology, but retains a strong interest in the arts ...

supervised by David Wheeler.

Career

Upon leaving Cambridge, he moved to USA and worked at the Systems Research Center (SRC) at

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) where, with Louis Monier, he was one of the two main creators of

. Following

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...

's acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

preventing

spamming Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing), or si ...

. Shortly thereafter he went to Google. After his early work at the University of Cambridge, where he researched

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

s and basic matters of security, he went on to enlarge upon that work as systems were deployed at large scale on the Internet. During his employment at Google, Burrows has studied concurrency & synchronisation and programming in the large – especially with respect to the C++ language. He designed the Chubby lock service for coordination between server nodes in large distributed systems.

Awards and honours

Burrows was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

in 2013. His nomination reads: Burrows received the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2003. He received the IET Achievement Medal (Computer Engineering) in 2019.

References

1963 births British computer scientists Google employees Fellows of the Royal Society Living people Alumni of University College London Alumni of Churchill College, Cambridge Computer security academics Digital Equipment Corporation people {{compu-bio-stub