Comments on: Jim Gray, computing pioneer, missing at sea off California Coast

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 20:40:44 +0000

Attention

This James Gray discussion continues at the new
DangerData blog which is here:
http://dangerdata.com/2007/02/03/jim-gray-computing-pioneer-missing-at-sea-help-find-him/

By: Fools Gold

Fools Gold — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:14:07 +0000

I don’t know if visual wavelength images are all that is available or not. I would think InfraRed superimposed on the visual or contrasted spatially would be helpful for finding boats.

Should be a simple machine-learning technique to get a computer to differentiate between ‘ocean’ and ‘sailboat’.
I guess the real problem is keeping track of which areas were ‘ocean’ and which were ‘cloud cover’.

By: glenn

glenn — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 15:39:18 +0000

I have processed over 500 images so far on mturk. Couple of observations.

Image quality is really bad. Man that is frustrating that in 2007 we don’t have the proper equipment deployed for this kind of survey.

Cloud cover is really frustrating – gives you an idea of how pilots must feel when they just can’t peer through the clouds to see what is underneath.

Joe for the record I didn’t see any evidence of global warming in the images I reviewed!

By: glenn

glenn — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 14:22:04 +0000

Some of those sat pictures are really tough to decipher. Haven’t found anything yet…

By: Fools Gold

Fools Gold — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 12:20:29 +0000

I wonder if solo sailors have available to them some sort of ‘dead man’s pedal’? Is there anything that countsdown and sounds an alarm and if the sailor doesn’t hit the alarm-acknowledge button, something happens such as an electronic ‘ping’ of some sort on gps equipment.

Ofcourse I doubt such a system, even if it existed, would have been used on what was contemplated as being a brief trip.

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 06:41:01 +0000

OK, here’s the Satellite imagery at Mechanical Turk. They’ve done a superb job of making it easy to help examine the images:
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=J0XZ58STDWJZ5QY4F9M0

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 06:36:31 +0000

Kip I just came in to post the details and you’d already found it. They may need help at Amazon Mechanical Turk to analyze the data. That was a great use of that service…

Dozens of colleagues at a number of tech firms had joined the search by Friday. Employees at Amazon.com, working with scientists at Google, Microsoft and NASA, had come up with an innovative solution to the eye-glazing task of scanning hundreds of satellite photographs of the waters off California’s coast.

Amazon engineers were using imaging software to split photos from a DigitalGlobe satellite into smaller segments, and then loading them onto Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” website — where numerous “Friends of Jim” would be able to scan them from their own computers.

The “Mechanical Turk” is a commercial service operated by Amazon that lets users recruit numerous helpers to do repetitive tasks that require human intelligence; For example, picking out a certain image in a series of photographs.

By: glenn

glenn — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 04:23:57 +0000

(41) Kip great article find. That is so amazing that so many people are now organizing and helping!!! Seems James Kim’s death is going to mean something to a lot of people in the future.

Joe hats off to you again as you played a critical role in getting people together to do this kind of stuff.

By: Kip

Kip — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 03:38:20 +0000

NASA photographed the search area today and scientists at Google, Microsoft and NASA are working with amazon.com analyzing the data.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/16611220.htm

By: Kip

Kip — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 22:35:14 +0000

[39] – I’d think probability of killer whales a factor in the boat’s vanishing minuscule. They can appear scary to somebody not familiar with them but the chances of their attacking or colliding with a 40′ boat extremely remote. Possibly more of a hazard would be a snoozing gray whale.