Citizenship United Kingdom Nationality British Influenced by Roger Needham | Doctoral advisor David Wheeler Fields Computer Science Name Michael Burrows | |
Institutions Google
University of Cambridge
Digital Equipment Corporation
AltaVista
Microsoft Thesis Efficient Data Sharing (1988) Known for Burrows–Wheeler transform Alma mater University College London, Churchill College, Cambridge Similar People David Wheeler, Sergey Brin, David Drummond, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt | ||
Residence United States of America | ||
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Michael Burrows, FRS (born 1963) is a British computer scientist and the creator of the Burrows–Wheeler transform currently working for Google. Born in Britain, he now lives in the United States, although remaining a British citizen.
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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.
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.
Following Compaq's acquisition of DEC, Burrows worked briefly for Microsoft preventing spamming. Shortly thereafter he went to Google.
After his early work at the University of Cambridge, where he researched microkernels 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 and synchronisation, and for programming in the large – especially with respect to the C++ language.
Awards and honours
Burrows was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. His nomination reads: