Google Earth, NASA, and the Mechanical Turk harnessed in search for Jim Gray

There has been an incredible outpouring of support from the tech community to aid in the search for missing Microsoft researcher and tech pioneer Jim Gray who has been lost at sea off the coast of San Francisco for four days. Gray was the first person to receive a PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley (’67 – ’69). Google has
directed the Google Earth satellite technology towards the search and NASA has donated the use of airplanes with high-end image technology. The images these technologies have produced have been divided into groups of 5 and posted onto Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. There are currently 4,000 groups of 5 available for review, but I am guessing they will all be chewed through in a number of hours. The story and MTurk link is Diggable here – hopefully it will be on the front page soon.

Unfortunately, the images look like this:

Apparently Gray’s boat will show up as a white block of approximately 4 pixels wide and 10 pixels long with sharp edges. There is a lot of noise in these, but hopefully someone will find something. I’m going to look through a couple now.

Edit: 150 groups of 5 have been knocked off in 5 minutes. Pretty cool. This has to be the best use of the MTurk to date.

Edit 2: An hour later and it’s popped up on the front page of the Tech section of Digg. 3600 HITS remain, but I think they’ll start to go fast now. Hopefully Arrington and the high profile blog and news sites will pick up the MTurk story soon.

Edit 3: A day later, and Arrington finally got a a post up about this. The comments in his post make it sound like all of the original batch were completed, but NASA photos are now up. This is what these ones look like, the colored dots representing how big a boat would be in the images:

Edit 4: It seems like they keep loading photos into the Turk – the counter is back up to +4000. There are also +900 HITS grouped separately that are password protected and designated to be reviewed by “qualified experts.” Maybe the ones that are flagged by non-experts in the normal batch are passed to this group for expert review? Pretty cool. Good luck!