Michael Burrows, FRS (born 1963) is a British computer scientist and the creator of the

Burrows–Wheeler transform The Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT, also called block-sorting compression) rearranges a character string into runs of similar characters. This is useful for compression, since it tends to be easy to compress a string that has runs of repeated c ...

, currently working for Google. Born in Britain, as of 2018 he lives in the United States, although he remains a British citizen.

Education

Burrows studied

Electronic Engineering Electronics engineering is a sub-discipline of electrical engineering which 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 ...

with

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

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

and then completed his PhD in the

Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 35 academic staff, 25 support staff, 35 affiliated research staff, and about 15 ...

, where he was a postgraduate student of Churchill College, Cambridge 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 un ...

(DEC) where, with

Louis Monier Louis Monier (born March 21, 1956) was a cofounder of the Internet search engine AltaVista together with Paul Flaherty and Michael Burrows. After he left AltaVista, he worked at eBay and then at Google. He left Google in August 2007 to join Cui ...

, he was one of the two main 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 ...

. Following

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

's acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

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, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especia ...

. 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 In software engineering, programming in the large and programming in the small refer to two different aspects of writing software, namely, designing a larger system as a composition of smaller parts, and creating those smaller parts by writing li ...

– especially with respect to the

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

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 The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) awards achievement medals to recognize engineers who have been significant contribution to various fields in engineering Every year, the award committee seeks and evaluates nominations and make ...

(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