Participants followed Carnes' instructions that they not call the event a funeral and that they use the present tense, not the past, when talking about Gray. Helland showed a video interview of Gray for the first hour and people stood up to tell stories about their missing colleague. Carnes did not attend.
Her feeling about having a public event began to shift, she said, when she visited Jim Bellingham, the chief technology officer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Bellingham spent three hours talking about the work he had been doing with her husband to analyze ocean data.
Carnes began to talk about holding an event that would focus on Gray's work and not on his status. "We do know who he was when he was with us," she said.
She picked May 31, which would mark a year since the family ended the underwater search. The family chose UC Berkeley because Gray completed his undergraduate and PhD studies there. With Carnes' guidance, Microsoft held its own internal tribute to Gray in January.
Throughout the day, there will be talks on Gray's contributions to technology, to his colleagues and to the physical sciences. One talk is billed "Scalability and Immortality." Another is on "Building the World Wide Telescope," a look at the role Gray played in building Microsoft's recently launched software program that turns Windows computers into a virtual observatory of space.
Many of the projects Gray worked on continue, and some of the teams have struggled with his absence. "We keep asking, 'How would Jim do this?' " said Alex Szalay, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University who worked with Gray on a database project called the SkyServer, part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which mapped the heavens using telescopes. Astronomers plan to name an asteroid after Gray.
Like the scientists they are, the participants plan to talk not only about what Gray taught them during his life but also what the search for him could teach others. Interspersed throughout the event will be talks about aspects of the search, including a detailed summary of the hunt along the ocean floor. The family has donated data from the underwater search, the first done of the region since 1989, to various governmental and nonprofit organizations, including the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Foundation.
