Using web-2.0 to look for missing scientist (Jim Gray)

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful. Now, Amazon has created a novel effort to help find him. They have put up satellite images of that area from the appropriate time frame on the into the Amazon S3 storage service. Then, they created tasks on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service to search for the missing boat in those pictures.

Examples of the object to look for in various orientations. The size of the boat in the sample images is the size of the object you are looking for, even though the images you are scanning are much larger.

See related post on Werner Vogel's blog. (Werner is the CTO of Amazon.)

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