via All things Distributed

A few weeks ago computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother’s ashes. The coast guard, unable to locate anything (not even debris), called off the search last week. Additionally last week 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

Update 2/3: We have now added the data from yesterdays NASA ER-2 flight to system. They are in the same Mechanical Turk Group as the satellite images search. Please follow this link to work on these. More details here

Update 2/4: Over 100,000 assigments have been completed, and new high resolution images are coming online. More details here.

Even though it didn’t seem to pan out, it was a great use of technology and distributed processing, even if it was using humans mostly for the processing part. There were some reports on Monday about body that was found near Point Diablo but it turned out not to be Jim. I’m also curious if Jim had any safety equipment onboard, such as a Category I EPIRB which would deploy automatically in the event of a sinking, sent out a distress beacon and identify his vessel.

Jim Gray’s Wikipedia entry

Jim Gray’s Microsoft page

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One of the yacht’s more interesting features: a nearly six-foot-deep pool, located aft on the main deck beneath a full overhang. Not only does it feature lighting and round windows on each side, but it also has a floor that rises up flush with the deck level when the pool is not in use. Another fascinating feature is a lobster tank in the lazarette.

She has a 40′ tender, and the usual toys every $20 billionaire could want on a yacht, but that wasn’t enough as this is/was his old yacht. (Google for +”Paul Allen” +Octopus). In fact (from SignOnSandiego.com):

While Tatoosh is here, owner Allen can make do with his yacht Octopus, the largest privately owned yacht in the world. The 413-foot craft has a 60-foot submarine and two helicopters. Forbes magazine this month dubbed Allen the third richest American, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, estimating Allen’s personal fortune at $20 billion.

Yeah, he’ll get by. Anyway… Here’s a few pictures I snapped before the security guards chased me down. Luckily I had a donut in my pocket (I have my reasons), my fast wits and cat like quickness allowed me to use it as a diversion. I quickly threw it in the water, and they promptly dove in after it, proceeding to fight to the death. Strange. . . Okay, maybe that didn’t really happen but it’s a good excuse for my total lack of photographic prowess.

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