Jerre Noe Endowed Scholarship

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This scholarship is available only to those students currently enrolled as a Computer Science or Computer Engineering major at the University of Washington.

Jerre Noe, 1923-2005

The Jerre Noe endowed scholarship was established by Jim and Donna Gray in 2001 in honor of Jerre's accomplishments and contributions to the CSE department. Jerre was recruited from SRI to head the newly-created Computer Science department in 1968 and served as chair until 1976. Beginning in 1950, Jerre - then SRI’s Assistant Director of Engineering - led the technical team of the ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting) Project - a joint venture between SRI and Bank of America that laid the cornerstone of modern electronic banking. The project resulted in checks with pre-printed account numbers, a check reader and sorter that could process ten checks per second with an error probability of less than 0.00001 percent, and the ERMA prototype, which was the first machine to enable multiple workers within a branch bank to determine account status and validate inputs electronically. In March 2001, Jerre and his ERMA team were honored with the Weldon B. Gibson Achievement. As chair, Jerre brought not only technical expertise, but also a sense of excellence and culture that still forms the cornerstone of CSE today.

On the evening of November 12, 2005, after a brief battle with mesothelioma (a rare and aggressive form of cancer), Jerre Noe passed away at the age of 82. Additional information on his full and active life can be found on the department's memorial page.

The purpose of this endowment is to provide assistance to undergraduate students in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. The award is based on academic merit.

Jim Gray

About the award donor: Jim Gray (James Nicholas Gray), was born January 12, 1944, and was lost at sea off the northern California coast while sailing on January 28, 2007. Jim was one of world’s most distinguished computer scientists. His numerous contributions to the field of database systems were recognized with membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the European Academy of Science. He was also a fellow of both the ACM and IEEE. In 1999 Jim was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award for his seminal contributions to our understanding of the concept of transactions and their implementation.

Jim’s pioneering research on transactions at IBM in the 1970s provides the foundation for today’s world of electronic commerce. Every time someone uses an ATM, reserves a seat on an airplane, or purchases an item on the web, they are relying on the mechanisms that Jim first developed. These techniques insure that the “right” thing always happens – even in the presence of software and hardware failures. While they seem second nature to us today, when Jim conceived of them they required very deep insight into the complexities of concurrently executing queries against a shared database system.

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