Michael Burrows (computer scientist)
{{Short description|British computer scientist}}
{{EngvarB|date=July 2017}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2017}}
{{Infobox scientist
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| birth_date = {{Birth year and age|1963}}{{cite web |title=Mike Burrows Access Summary |url=https://archivesit.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Mike-Burrows-Access-Summary.pdf |website=Archives of IT |access-date=11 May 2025}}
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| citizenship = United Kingdom
| nationality = British
| fields = Computer Science
| workplaces = Google
University of Cambridge
Digital Equipment Corporation
AltaVista
Microsoft
| education =
| alma_mater = University College London (BSc)
University of Cambridge (PhD)
| thesis_title = Efficient Data Sharing
| thesis_url = https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-153.pdf
| thesis_year = 1988
| doctoral_advisor = David Wheeler{{MathGenealogy|id=137831}}
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| known_for = Burrows–Wheeler transform{{Burrows Wheeler 1994}}{{Cite journal | last1 = Salson | first1 = M. | last2 = Lecroq | first2 = T. | last3 = Léonard | first3 = M. | last4 = Mouchard | first4 = L. | title = A four-stage algorithm for updating a Burrows–Wheeler transform | doi = 10.1016/j.tcs.2009.07.016 | journal = Theoretical Computer Science | volume = 410 | issue = 43 | pages = 4350 | year = 2009 | doi-access = free }}
| awards = Fellow of the Royal Society (2013)
SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2003)
IET Achievement Medal (2019)
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| website = {{URL|research.google.com/pubs/author24014.html}}
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}}Michael Burrows, FRS (born 1963) is a British computer scientist, one of the creators of AltaVista, 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.{{DBLP|name=Michael Burrows}}{{Cite journal | last1 = Savage | first1 = S. | last2 = Burrows | first2 = M. | last3 = Nelson | first3 = G. | last4 = Sobalvarro | first4 = P. | last5 = Anderson | first5 = T. | title = Eraser: A dynamic data race detector for multithreaded programs | doi = 10.1145/265924.265927 | journal = ACM Transactions on Computer Systems | volume = 15 | issue = 4 | pages = 391 | year = 1997 | citeseerx = 10.1.1.175.3886 | s2cid = 1492924 }}{{Cite journal | last1 = Abadi | first1 = M. N. | authorlink1 = Martín Abadi| last2 = Burrows | first2 = M. | authorlink2 = Michael Burrows (computer scientist)| last3 = Lampson | first3 = B. | authorlink3 = Butler Lampson| last4 = Plotkin | first4 = G. | authorlink4 = Gordon Plotkin| title = A calculus for access control in distributed systems | doi = 10.1145/155183.155225 | journal = ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems | volume = 15 | issue = 4 | pages = 706 | year = 1993 | hdl = 1842/207 | url = http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/gdp/publications/Calculus_for_Access_Control.pdf| citeseerx = 10.1.1.72.3756 | s2cid = 13260508 }}
Education
Burrows studied Electronic Engineering with Computer Science at University College London and then completed his PhD in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he was a postgraduate student of Churchill College, Cambridge supervised by David Wheeler.{{cite thesis |degree=PhD |first=Michael|last=Burrows |title=Efficient Data Sharing |publisher=University of Cambridge |year=1988 |url=http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-153.pdf|authorlink=Michael Burrows (computer scientist)}}{{Cite journal | last1 = Burrows | first1 = M. | last2 = Abadi | first2 = M. | last3 = Needham | first3 = R. M. | doi = 10.1098/rspa.1989.0125 | title = A Logic of Authentication | journal = Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences | volume = 426 | issue = 1871 | pages = 233 | year = 1989 |bibcode = 1989RSPSA.426..233B | s2cid = 61768542 }}{{Who's Who | title=BURROWS, Dr. Michael | id = U260924 | volume = 2017 | edition = online Oxford University Press|location=Oxford}}
Career
Upon leaving Cambridge, he moved to USA and worked at the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where, with Louis Monier, he was one of the two main creators of AltaVista.{{cite web|url=http://www.citivu.com/dvorak/96awds.html |title=1996 Dvorak Awards Winners |publisher=citivu.com |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070808033835/http://citivu.com/dvorak/96awds.html |archive-date=8 August 2007 }}
Following Compaq's acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for Microsoft preventing spamming.{{cite web|url=http://www.langreiter.com/space/Michael+Burrows|publisher=angreiter.com|title=Michael Burrows}} Shortly thereafter he went to Google.{{cite news|first=Crystal |last=Lu |title=The Genius: Mike Burrows' self-effacing journey through Silicon Valley |url=http://www.stanford.edu/group/gpj/cgi-bin/drupal/?q=node/60 |work=The Cardinal Inquirer |date=12 January 2007 |access-date=1 July 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080217003150/http://www.stanford.edu/group/gpj/cgi-bin/drupal/?q=node%2F60 |archive-date=17 February 2008 |url-status=dead }}
After his early work at the University of Cambridge, where he researched microkernels{{citation needed|date=March 2017}} 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.{{citation needed|date=October 2012}} He designed the Chubby lock service for coordination between server nodes in large distributed systems.{{Cite journal |last=Burrows |first=Mike |date=2006 |title=The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems |url=https://research.google/pubs/pub27897/ |journal=7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)}}
Awards and honours
Burrows was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. His nomination reads:
{{centred pull quote|text=Dr Michael Burrows is distinguished for his pioneering work on web search and indexing. He was one of the designers of the early search engine Altavista. He was also one of the pioneers of the application of formal logic to the verification of security protocols. He has made seminal contributions to many other areas of computer science and engineering ranging from compression through synchronisation to performance measurement. He is one of the engineers who led the design of Google's distributed computing infrastructure.{{cite web|title=Dr Michael Burrows FRS |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151123141155/https://royalsociety.org/people/michael-burrows-11174/ |archive-date=23 November 2015 |url=https://royalsociety.org/people/michael-burrows-11174/ |publisher=royalsociety.org |location=London |author=Anon |year=2013 }} One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: {{blockquote|"All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --{{cite web|url=https://royalsociety.org/about-us/terms-conditions-policies/ |title=Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies |access-date=9 March 2016 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150925220834/https://royalsociety.org/about-us/terms-conditions-policies/ |archive-date=25 September 2015 }}}}}}
Burrows received the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2003.{{cite web|title=The Mark Weiser Award|url=https://www.sigops.org/awards/mw/|publisher=ACM SIGOPS|access-date=5 July 2019}}
He received the IET Achievement Medal (Computer Engineering) in 2019.{{cite web|url=https://conferences.theiet.org/achievement/winners/achievement/achieve-medals-winners.cfm|title=Winner of IET Achievement Medals 2019}}
References
{{Reflist|2}}
{{Kanellakis Award laureates}}
{{FRS 2013}}
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Category:British computer scientists
Category:Fellows of the Royal Society
Category:Alumni of University College London
Category:Alumni of Churchill College, Cambridge
Category:Computer security academics
Category:Digital Equipment Corporation people
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