James Gray, a winner of the Turing Award and Microsoft researcher, has been missing since January 28th after he went sailing to scatter his mother’s ashes on a set of islands near San Francisco Bay.

Private planes and the US Coast Guard searched but found nothing, so friends and family gathered their tech resources together.  A collaboration of NASA, Amazon, Google and Microsoft brought together satellite and high-altitude reconnaissance pictures.  These photographs were loaded up to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and through a website shared on the net so that volunteers could help to review the pictures and flag potential tiles of pictures for experts to review. 

Over 100,000 photographs and counting have been reviewed so far, but James has not been found yet.  The collaboration and use of technology however stand as a very interesting monument to the support to help James and the potential of bringing together people through online resources.  As a former intelligence analyst, I find it extremely impressive how many images could be reviewed in a short amount of time by so many people.  The effort is amazing.

here is an example of what volunteers are able to do as they can through the images.

A user will sign in to Amazon, review the picture quickly, accept it if they want to officially review it, then click yes or no if they see something or not.  Plus they can write in a comment if they need to for the experts review.

Join the Search

I only hope that Mr. Gray will be found or rescued safely.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 1:36 am and is filed under Microsoft, Turing Award. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.