Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, currently working on the next generation of search. Previously, Jim's research focus was MyLifeBits, part of the CARPE research community, whose first and second workshops he was proud to chair. Jim has also done research on the topics of personal media management/enhancement, telepresence, and reliable multicast. His research has led to features in Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, and Bing.com. He lives in the San Francisco area. For more about Jim, see his web page.

Since 1998, Gordon has been working on the MyLifeBits project with Jim Gemmell – a quest to understand how you store everything in your life in cyberspace. MyLifeBits is a personal transaction processing database. MyLifeBits captures and holds a lifetime's worth of articles, books, letters, memos, photos, presentations, music, home movies, and videotaped lectures. Gordon’s archive includes phone calls, IM scripts, years of email, web pages visited, and daily activities captured by the SenseCam. One of the challenges of MyLifeBits has been to build applications, e.g. timelines and viewers for people to take their personal memorabilia out of the shoebox and store them digitally for all kinds of future usage from a daily aid to memory through record keeping to immortality.

Your Life, Uploaded (previouslyTotal Recall) is the book written by Jim Gemmell, the project leader, and Gordon about the MyLifeBits induced vision of the inevitability of Total Recall. In 2010, Gordon’s personal store or e-memory is over a quarter of a Terabyte, and the data is accumulating at about 1 Gigabyte per month.

Gordon has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research since 1995. He is the former vice president of research and development at Digital Equipment Corporation (1960-1983); professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University (1966-72); founding assistant director of the National Science Foundation's Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate (1986-1988); panel chair of the National Research and Education Network (NREN) for creating the Internet (1987-1988); advisor/investor to 100+ High Tech start-up companies (1983- ); and a founding trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. He has written several books about computer architecture and High Tech Ventures (1991) with John McNamara describing the Bell Mason Diagnostic. He is a member of the Bell Mason Group that consults on starting corporate ventures.

Gordon created ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize in 1987 to acknowledge and reward progress in parallel processing. He is a fellow of the ACM, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, IEEE, NAE, NAS, and 1991 National Medal of Technology medalist.

For a complete biography and publication list, please see Gordon's webpage and MyLifeBits.com.