People / Jim King

I was hired by Adobe in 1988 to form the Advanced Technology Group (now called the Advanced Technology Labs) and turned the management of that group over to Tom Malloy, in 1996.

My current title is Senior Principal Scientist, Emeritus, reporting to Tom Malloy. Although I am still a regular Adobe employee, I am only working 60% of the normal hours. This is a first step to my retirement sometime in the future.

Most most recent activities have centered around Adobe's Standards activities, having been the interim manager of our Corporate Standards Group for about 10 months in 2011. Before that, as the Adobe PDF Architect, during 2007 I spent a large part of my time with the technical tasks involved in turning the management of the PDF specification over to the International Standards Organization (ISO) to become the ISO 32000 standard which was published by ISO in July of 2008. This involved leading a team to edit the 1300 page PDF Reference into a 760 page ISO Specification using the official ISO document template, style and specialized terminology.

Before that, besides providing technical leadership for the ATG, I started and managed the Adobe patent program, started and managed the Adobe Library and was a champion and expert on PostScript Level 2, Color and Color management, XML and its relationship to Adobe products, and am still teaching PDF internals to anyone who will listen. I also initiated and for a period managed internal Adobe standardization activities for PostScript and PDF.

Before joining Adobe I worked for IBM Research for 19 years, both at the T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York and at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. My Ph.D. thesis earned under Professor Robert W. Floyd was from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and was one of the first on proving the correctness of programs using mathematical means (1969). I continued in that line of work for almost 10 years, and in the latter part, branching out into what I called “symbolic execution” of programs. Later, when I move to IBM San Jose I organized the Almaden I/O Systems Laboratory which was doing things similar to what Adobe was doing at that time, working on printer controllers, font development, and page description languages.