James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was “The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints”. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs’ for Unix systems. He spent many years as a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java, and a researcher at Sun labs where his primary interest was software development tools. He then was the Chief Technology Officer of Sun’s Developer Products Group and the CTO of Sun’s Client Software Group. He briefly worked for Oracle after the acquisition of Sun in 2010. After a brief stint at Google, he became the chief software architect at Liquid Robotics where he spent his time writing software for the Waveglider, an autonomous ocean-going robot. In May of 2017 he became a Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services.
Awards: The Economist Innovation Award, The Flame Award USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, Officer of the Order of Canada, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, and a long list of patents.
