Jim Gray, a computer scientist at Microsoft, was reported missing at sea on Jan. 28th. Thanks to Google and Amazon, you can help search for him by going through some of the tens of thousands of satellite images, looking for his boat.

The search site is here. You have to register with Amazon to participate. When I did, I didn’t see the Jim Gray search in the list of available projects, but it showed up when I searched for “gray.”

The NY Times has covered this. Microsoft has an update page. There’s a FaceBook group for the project. And here’s the U of Texas image analysis site. (Thanks to Bill St. Arnaud for the links.)

(This type of effort is known as a “mechanical Turk” because, like the chess playing machine it’s named after, there are humans at the heart of it.) [Tags: gim_gray mechanical_turk google amazon collaboration emergency everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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