San Jose

Jim King
Senior Principal Scientist

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.

I am currently the PDF Architect, and during 2007 I have 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. 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 now manage 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.

Projects and Accomplishments

• Technical Lead on ISO 32000 (PDF Standardization)
• Leader of Mars Architecture Team & Built Prototype
• Managed the CEO’s Technology Council
• Initiated the Adobe Technical Library
• Managed Adobe’s Patent Program (‘89-96)
• Championed PostScript Level 2
• Recognized Technical Speaker

Publications

• King, James; Rosenthol, Leonard; Helander, Diana; 2008. Document and Application Format. IS&T Archiving Conference, 56-61.
• King, J. C. 2004. A format design case study: PDF. In HYPERTEXT '04: Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, 95–97.
• King, J. C. 2002. The color engineer. In IS&T Color Imaging Conference, 39-40.
• Chamberlin, D. D., King, J. C., Slutz, D. R., Todd, S. J. P., and Wade, B. W. 1981. JANUS: An interactive system for document composition. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA symposium on Text manipulation, 82–91.
• King, J. C. 1980. Program correctness: on inductive assertion methods. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 6(5), 465-479.
• Hantler, S. L. and King, J. C. 1976. An introduction to proving the correctness of programs. ACM Comput. Surv., 8(3), 331–353.
• King, J. C. 1976. Symbolic execution and program testing. Commun. ACM, 19(7), 385–394.
• King, J. C. and Floyd, R. W. 1970. An interpretation oriented theorem prover over integers. In STOC '70: Proceedings of the second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, 169–179.
• King, James Cornelius 1969. A program verifier, PhD Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University.

Presentations

• King, James. 2008. The Future of PDF and Standards, Adobe Max 2008 Conference, San Francisco, Ca..
• King, James; Rosenthol, Leonard; Helander, Diana; 2008. Document and Application Format. IS&T Archiving Conference, 56-61
• King, James C. 2007. Document formats and image formats. DPC/BL JPEG2000 workshop, 2007, London, UK7.
• King, James C. 2007. Inside the PDF ecosystem. XPS/PDF Conference, 2007, Winterthur, Switzerland.
• King, James C. 2007. The future of PDF and Flash. Xplor University, 2007, Miami Beach, FL, USA.
• King, James C. 2006. Resolution independent rendering. IGAEA Conference, 2006., San Luis Obispo, CA, USA.
• King, James C. 2001. XML and/or PDF. Seybold Seminars, 2001, San Francisco, CA, USA.
• King, James C. 1998. PDF Day, PDF: A look inside, Seybold Seminars, 1998, New York, New York USA.
• King, James C. 2004. Getting organized beyond the desktop. Seybold Seminars, 2004, San Francisco, CA, USA
• King, James C. 2001. Why color management. The 9th Congress of the International Colour Association, 2001, Rochester, NY, USA.