From an early age Gio, was a great enthusiast for Armstrong Siddeley cars. He shared this enthusiasm and his knowledge developed over many years of ownership of his Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, with other owners across the world. Gio joined the Armstrong Siddeley Clubs and gave them terrific and very tangible support, and often attended club events across the world. He was not a man to do things by halves! 

He made very many friends in this community and was much admired. I feel privileged to be able to say Gio was my friend and know I speak for many in our community across many continents in saying we so greatly enjoyed being in his company.

One of the many things I will never forget about Gio is this generous and kind action: Some years ago I was in need of a scarce back wing / fender / guard for my car. Mentioning this to Gio he said he thought he had one to spare and could perhaps fetch it over the next time he visited the UK, not an easy thing to do. On their next visit I well remember collecting Gio and Voy in my car to find to my amazement Gio with the delicate bubble wrapped rear wing over his shoulder and Voy clutching a rear wheel cover! Gio had somehow managed to get both on the plane as hand luggage! Gio was not a man to limited by convention! 

An exceptional man of great intellect, practicality and kindness. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him and not least by all across the world in the Armstrong Siddeley community.  
 

Gio has been my mentor @Stanford. I came as a MS student in 1981, and I managed to work with him and Sham Navathe during the 1981 summer; so he invited me to come back in the summer 1982, to contiue the work. And in 1983 he invited me to teach CS347, "Distributed Databases". This was the first time for such a course in the world, based on my manuscript, later published in 1984. I was Italian, age 28, no teaching experience in US, had about 20 students in class, and over 100 SUTN auditors from all over the Silicon Valley. It was a challenge, but Gio trusted me. And this experience has changed my life.
We wrote 10 highly cited papers together, I particularly like to remember the CACM paper "Towards Megaprogramming", reporting his own experience with big systems. I still remember his enthusiasm when, back in 1981, he was showing me how to use Arpanet ot Telnet, and login on his computer while his terminal was hosted at UCLA. To me, this looked as science fiction. Yet it was the start of Internet as we all knwow it today.   
I met my wife Teresa when she was aalso a Stanford MS student in linguistics, back in 1981; we went back to Stanford every summer for about 25 years. Voy has been as a granma for our kid Paolo, she was coming with goodies to fill up our houses - always different, always missing some ingredients that she was filing up. We have been with Voy & Gio in the mountains, in Palo Alto, and then, many times, at Opera Plaza. We did many things together, They came to Milano several times, not as many as we wanted. 
Gio was a precious person, a friend and a life companion. We miss him.
Stefano & Teresa Ceri

I worked on my PhD with Gio from 1997-2001 seeking to define an algebra for heterogeneous ontology maintenance. It was a super ambitious undertaking, since knowledge bases were somewhat fuzzily defined back then and there were no significant results in this area. However, Gio's infectious enthusiasm got me hooked on the idea, and it still drives me forward today.

I started my research not long after junglee, the first shopping search engine, was spun out of the infolab. Looking for productive distractions to make progress on my work, I spent the summer of 1998 at a junglee competitor, My Simon. There I learned that at any given time roughly thirty percent of the scripts to transform shopping site content into their search result structure would fail. The engineering team kept a prioritized list of failing scripts to manually fix. The secret sauce was a graphical script IDE that allowed an army of non coders to create and maintain scripts.

This enterprise workflow encapsulated a sliver of a microcosm of our goal. How to go about transforming an entirely manual process on simple product SKUs into an automated process that works with arbitrarily complex structures that would get progressively more out of sync. Today the vision remains incompletely realized. In mathematics, category theory is providing the best grounding for such an algebra, but we weren’t there yet. It wasn’t clear to me either how to make progress on the problem.

The breakthrough that allowed me to complete my work came from personal data research that at first seemed completely separate from my thesis. I showed Gio a family tree compiled by my uncle along with some of my first manual efforts to expand it using genealogy data from the web. Gio got excited and showed me the research he had done on his family. I realized when we got into the details, that the multi-hundred year span of the source material was an ideal representation of the overall complexity of my thesis task.

I finished my thesis using a simplified model of airline ticket search (right as travel search engines were solidifying their presence) and automated methods for significantly narrowing textual and structural mismatches between related domains to allow minimal and continuously decreasing manual intervention in creating and maintaining extractions from heterogeneous data sources.

It was a joy to work with Gio. He was supportive when I needed it and gave me autonomy when it made sense. The broad scope of his real world interests intersected with mine in just the right way to enlighten me enough to finish my thesis work. Thanks to his support and his enthusiastic inclusion of his own family (Voy) and academic family (Hector Garcia-Molina & Marianne Siroker) into my support crew, it made all the difference for me. He has been a great model for me to develop intellectual relationships right.

The legacies Gio left us, real world problem solving, trying manual before automatic, generous support are valuable to me every day of my life.

Gio Wiederhold, expert in databases and intellectual property, has died at 86

Born in Italy, raised in wartime Germany, and an émigré to the US in his twenties, Wiederhold first made a name in the fast-growing field of computer science in the 1960s and ’70s.

https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/gio-wiederhold-expert-databases-and-intellectual-property-has-died-86

One of my favorite explanations of my Gio’ place in computer history, is that the unabridged OED lists his book as one of first use of the word CRASH in the context of computers.

Find the original story with pictures here:
Meet Gio Wiederhold published in The Spark (the IITK campus magazine) Volume 2 Dec 2021

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Gio Wiederhold, an original KIAP professor, was on campus in 1964-65. Then in his late twenties, and one of the youngest KIAP participants, he lived in Vishnupuri near Parvati Bagla Road in Kanpur and commuted to the Institute in the station wagons, which were used to pick up and drop off KIAP staff that could not be housed on campus. He was there to teach CS courses, take care of the Computer Center with its 1620, and start the procurement process for the IBM 7044 machine. In that one year, he managed to travel across the country, had a lot of adventures, took quite a few photos, and stored up enough memories to last a lifetime. Most of us are familiar with the collection of KIAP era pictures he assembled, now readily available at his Stanford site, and republished almost everywhere.

Today, Gio is Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Science, Medicine, and Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He is still very active, still loves Indian food, and remains in touch with a lot of the original program people. Just to get an idea of how active Gio still is, here he is, in his study. Two huge monitors (one with a photo of a 1964 KIAP event), plus a third monitor on the bookshelf behind in case these two are not enough. Plus, stacks and stacks of shelves full of books.

Over four hours of conversation he retold a lot of stories. Here are some of them!

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Night Flights to Bombay, or, How IITK got its IBM 7044 Computer

IITK under construction was an adventurous place. Buildings going up everywhere, professors creating courses, computers being delivered on bullock carts.

Among all the chaos was the plan to get another computer system – bigger than the IBM 1620, that is.

Because the 1620 was already there, but inadequate for growth and idiosyncratic in terms of design, the decision was to get an IBM 7044 with a more conventional architecture. Most American universities had one, so collaboration would be easy, the IBM guys on site could maintain it, and so on. Gio Wiederhold, the computer whiz, was charged with the actual acquisition process.

Gio had an interesting background, having started out with vacuum-tube computers in 1958. That meant, in part, that he knew more about computer hardware than most computer-savvy people of that time, though his youthful face didn’t give you the slightest inkling. He knew about the newest I/O devices, storage, tape drives, printers, you name it. That was rather unfortunate for IBM, whose India Sales Team in Bombay had not heard of Gio.

However, in true salesmanship fashion, IBM Bombay could hassle Gio and thus try to weaken his negotiating ability. They would call him for negotiation meetings at a days’ notice, with some excuse about someone from IBM HQ being available for that day only. They knew fully-well that there was no way anyone from Kanpur could show up the next morning for a 10AM meeting. There were no flights from Kanpur, and the Lucknow-Delhi-Bombay flight was in the afternoon, and always fully booked. No way he could make those morning meetings, so they expected he would ask for delays, which would get him obliged to them, giving them an edge. Such are negotiation tactics.

But they didn’t know Gio.

Small side-story here. A little-known fact about the Indian Postal Service was that airmail distribution in India to and from major cities was on a nightly hub-and-spoke system that was run by Indian Airlines. Late at night, Indian Airlines aircraft took off from major cities loaded with sacks of mail. They all converged at Nagpur, where the bags were re-distributed, and the aircraft headed back with mail that was to be delivered to their city. These were cargo flights, not intended for passengers.

But Gio knew about those flights. Don’t ask how. He would take a campus car, drive to Lucknow, and get onto the night flight to Nagpur, right among those sacks of mail. The plane carried the pilot, the co-pilot, sacks of mail, and Gio. They all knew him, they knew about IITK, and there was never any trouble.

Off they would fly to Nagpur, Gio hopping off one Avro and getting into the next while the mail was sorted and reloaded from one aircraft to another. He would be at Santa Cruz airport in Bombay early the next morning. A quick run to the hotel at Juhu to freshen up, and off to the meeting with IBM.

Poor IBM. In all the meetings that they had with Gio, they never figured out how he got there so fast. As a consequence, their negotiation and sales skills failed to give them an advantage, resulting, in part, in IITK receiving a first-class 7044 system on par with the ones being installed at US universities in the sixties, and IITK having a very good machine well into the seventies.

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Cadillacs in Coonoor

One little-known fact about the birth of IITK was the difficulty that the program faced in getting Program Leaders and Professors to come from the USA to IITK. The issue was that if they stepped away from their home base where all the newest developments were happening, they would soon fall behind. Plus, for faculty, there was the issue of tenure, seniority, paper publication, research, and all kinds of complications for family relocation.

Thus, creative ways had to be dreamed up to incentivize people to move. In addition to the more formal ‘temporary relocation’ efforts used by the administration, spouses who wanted to go but were held back because their partners were hesitant, used creative methods. This was very much the case with the admin head honcho himself, Jerry Vielehr.

Jerry Vielehr was the Administrative Officer of the overall program. That meant, among other things, overall responsibility for constructing the campus. Big job. Jerry’s wife Patricia was very social. Jerry loved his beer. While Jerry was ensuring that the campus was being built to specification, he didn’t get out very much. On one of their return visits to the U.S. Jerry realized that he had been too busy to see much of India. Patricia figured out that he could make such a sightseeing trip later, and arranged to enable that, with his own special car. To do that, she reached out to General Motors to modify a fancy car. (Patricia was the daughter of a New Jersey Governor, so well connected).

It had to be a convertible to keep cool breezes blowing, had to run on Indian roads using Indian-grade fuel (which meant a variable quality of kerosene/diesel/petrol mixtures). The most important customization: it had to have a refrigerator to keep Jerry’s beer cold.

Well, the custom-car was built, then loaded on a ship and delivered to the Bombay docks in the middle of June 1965. Gio Wiederhold, among the younger and more enterprising KIAP people on campus, went off to Bombay to collect it from the dockyard and get it ready.

Why Gio? We don’t know for sure, but we do know that he had figured out how to work the system. Hevcould bring in computers from the US that arrived with no documentation; he got rides in Indian Airlinesvplanes that normally didn’t carry passengers, and so, getting the car out from Mazgaon Docks without any customs delays was a piece of cake. (You have to remember that getting ‘any’ car imported into India those days was a major miracle).

When the car was in hand, Jerry and Gio travelled much of South and Central India, driving down the west coast (Goa, Mysore, Ooty, then down to Cape Comorin, and up the east coast to Tirupati, Chennai, Hyderabad, thence back via Bhopal).

There were several challenges when driving a Cadillac in India. Cadillacs are gas guzzlers, and this one was an especially thirsty car, having to haul and run the built-in refrigerator as well as the car itself. One day, they pulled up at a petrol station in one of the many villages. The car was followed by a large group of the local boys who were amazed at its size and shape and called it a boat car! The rural petrol bunk was
an old one; the pump was operated manually with a hand-crank. Jerry had the engine running to keep the A/C going, while filling petrol. After many minutes of the hand-cranking, the petrol bunk operator finally gave up and told Jerry to switch off the engine and said, "Sir your car is gaining on my pump and it will never get filled!".

Another major challenge they had to deal with was handling a car of that size on narrow Indian roads. Indian cars at that time were the Hindustan Ambassador, the Fiat 1100 and the Standard Herald, none more than 14-feet long and five feet wide. The Cadillac cruiser was over 24 feet long, more than six feet across, and over 4000 lbs. When in a city, they had to be careful to not get stuck in narrow lanes that had been
designed 500 years back for bullock carts. When crossing rivers that didn’t have a bridge, simply getting the car onto the ferry was an adventure.

Having a limited-slip differential gave the Cadillac some advantage on slippery roads, even when Jeeps would have two wheels spinning on a muddy side. But crossing the Narmada river at Hoshangabad was a memorable event. The car had to be gingerly driven down to the riverbank, then up rickety planks to the ferry itself. The ferry, sized to haul an Ambassador or a Jeep, was too short for the Caddy, and the crossing
would happen with the rear wheels right on the back end of the ferry, with the rest of the car hanging out over the water.

On this occasion, the tires slipped off the planks while driving the car up onto the ferry. The usual method when a Fiat slipped off was to round up the local people, pick up the car and put it back on.

But this behemoth weighed nearly two tons, and there were not enough people to do the heavy lifting, so poles and levers had to be used (which didn’t do the bodywork any good, but that is another story). With enthusiastic yells and ‘Dum Lagao Haissa!’ providing the rhythm, the car was shoved onto the ferry.

The Caddy, slightly the worse for wear, did the entire trip without any problems, although its fuel tank had lost some capacity.

After this trip, the car had to be exported and was eventually sold to someone in Bhutan. Jerry Vielehr returned to the US after completing a seven-year KIAP stint in 1969, probably the longest among all the American faculty and officials.

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About the Contributors
These stories were retold by Gio Wiederhold in a meeting with Shirish Joshi, at his Bay Area home in July 2021. Gio’s love for India and IITK remains undiminished. Shirish had reached Gio’s residence expecting an hour-long conversation. Four hours later,
our Spark correspondent had to tear himself away because it was late, and 'he' was getting tired.

Gio Wiederhold Speaks Out
on Moving into Academia in Mid-Career, How to Be an Effective Consultant, Why You Should Be a Program Manager at a Funding Agency, the Need for Ontology Algebra and Simulations, and More

by Marianne Winslett

This issue’s interview with Gio Wiederhold took place in June 2001, a few days before
the festivities associated with Gio’s retirement from Stanford University. Gio has been a
member of the Stanford faculty for many years, active both in computer science and in
medical informatics.

https://sigmodrecord.org/publications/sigmodRecord/0112/wiederhold.pdf