Using the Web to Search for Missing Persons

I spent a good chunk of the weekend looking for Jim Gray, who's been lost at sea for a week. Gray is a researcher at Microsoft and was a major influence in the development of early database technology with a variety of companies, and much like the disappearance of James Kim and his family, the tech community is rallying to help.

Gray set sail from San Francisco for the nearby Farallon Islands (to scatter his mother's ashes, no less), but his 40-foot sailboat mysteriously vanished. Coast Guard searches turned up nothing over four days.

But I haven't been looking for Gray at sea. (I can't stand boats.) Rather, I've been searching online, as friends and family have turned to an unlikely method to search for the missing boat: Amazon's Mechanical Turk system.

Mechanical Turk is a system Amazon provides for third-party companies who have hefty data processing needs but which computers don't do a good job at. One example has a company asking people to mark a series of photos of roadways with all the drainage systems and manholes. People are paid nominally (6 cents for 50 images in the above example) for providing this service.

What Amazon did in Gray's case is commission satellite photos of the area where Gray's ship might have drifted. Thousands of images were created, then posted on the Mechanical Turk system for the masses to pore over in search of a tiny object that might be Jim's boat, roughly 10 by 4 pixels in size. The search is still going on, though virtually all of the images have been looked at at least once. (Some people have done 1,000 assignments of up to 5 images each.) It truly is like looking for a needle in a haystack, though people have uncovered bigger boats and even planes. Check it out on Amazon's site here.

Unfortunately there is still no news on Jim's whereabouts. High-res imagery will be appearing soon. Click here for more info on the search for Gray and on its technical aspects.