
The Coast Guard searched the waters off Northern California on Wednesday for <A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/missing.sailor.ap/index.html">an award-winning computer scientist</A> missing since a weekend sailing trip to scatter his mother's ashes at sea. A cargo plane, a helicopter and six patrol boats have been scouring the Pacific since Monday for Jim Gray, who helped develop the technology behind popular computer mapping programs like Google Earth. Gray, founder and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, won the A.M. Turing Award -- the "Nobel Prize of computer science" -- in 1998 for research that paved the way for automatic teller machines, computerized airline reservations and online shopping.