Tech Shout!

After the very tragic disappearance of Cnet.com editor, James Kim, the world might possibly be witnessing another death of another in the tech world. Jim N. Gray, a researcher and manager of Microsoft Research’s eScience Group, went sailing off the coast of California last Sunday, in his 40-foot yacht, and has been missing since then.

Gray,63 had actually set out to spread the ashes of his now deceased mother in the ocean at the nearby Farallon Islands. Up till now, no SOS message was received by the coast guards. In fact, several days of intensive searching by the U.S Coast Guard and private planes revealed no sign of Jim Gray or his boat.

Desperate friends and colleagues of Gray’s then turned to the Internet for help. Engineers from NASA, online retailer Amazon and technology companies like Google and of course Microsoft, organized a satellite and high-altitude aircraft to photograph the area where Gray was believed to be located.

The photographs were then split into smaller segments and uploaded on to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which is web site that allows virtually anyone to take part in the search effort. He said “satellite image inspection experts” would then examine the marked tiles to determine which should be forwarded to the Coast Guard for action.

In fact, Amazon’s Chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, wrote this in his blog on Friday, “We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Gray’s boat in any of these images. The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view.”

Similarly, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth division had satellites capture high-resolution imagery in an area along the coastline, and will also post the images for volunteers to scrutinize. Besides, Microsoft is also collecting radar satellite images which penetrate clouds and is using them together with its Oceanview software, which can detect vessels automatically.

Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist and skilled amateur sailor is a leader in the field of database systems and transaction processing, and has even received several computer science awards, that include the prestigious Turing Award in 1998. In fact, it was Gray who had developed the groundbreaking System R when he was working for IBM. Jim Gray and his group are working in areas of astronomy, geography, hydrology, oceanography, biology and health care.

Those who wish to participate in the MTurk image analysis effort in hope to find Jim Gray can visit the MTurk website.