Jim Gray

The daylong event honoring the computer-science whiz who helped create automated teller machines will be part celebration, part science fair. But don't call it a memorial or funeral. That would be too final. The commemoration of Jim Gray's life on Saturday is billed as a "tribute," as if the 6-foot-3 Microsoft Corp. researcher might stroll right into UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall for the kind of academic symposium he loved to attend, where experts come together to solve a problem.

Friends of a renowned Bay Area computer scientist whose sailboat vanished this week off the coast here pledged Friday to continue hunting for the missing sailor even though the U.S. Coast Guard has called off its search. Jim Gray, 63, a research pioneer and founder of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, left San Francisco on Sunday aboard his 40-foot sailboat, Tenacious, to scatter his mother's ashes off the Farallon Islands, about 30 miles west of the city. He planned to be back that day.