Distributed Search and Rescue

It’s late and my eyes are a bit strained so I’ll keep this short. Computer scientist and Turing award laureate Jim Gray was reported missing on January 28th. The Coast Guard and also many of his friends immediately started a search operation. The Guard with C-130s, helicopters and patrol boats his friends with smaller private planes. He was sailing from San Francisco bay to the nearby Farallon islands when reported missing. On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is used to distribute the imagery among Internet users everywhere in order to shard the effort of searching for Jim’s boat. Being a sailor myself, I just reported on over 200+ pieces of imagery and quick scanned about the same number. We’ll see in the coming days if this changes anything for his family and friends, it’s certainly an inspired merge between satellite imagery and Internet technology. Pitch into the image analysis effort here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Computer Security in the Mobile Age

Image
I was looking over a stack of old conference papers and found this review of the paper written by myself in collaboration with Lucijan Carić, which we presented in 1996 at the Virus Bulletin Conference in Brighton, UK. "After a welcome coffee break, Joe Wells (IBM) presented a paper on the PC-virus ‘hot zones’, after which Lucijan Caric and Boris Debic provided a timely reminder of the implications of an Internet-enabled world: if malware is able to send data silently to remote sites, then the problems, unfortunately, are all too clear." The presentation was immediately following Joe Wells'. This was quite a recognition at the time, as Joe is and was back then widely regarded as one of the  foremost  experts in understanding security threats in the wild.  The paper had a couple of highlights. It was the first to establish a new class of threats. A category where threats would take advantage of the Internet, not only as a propagation medium as was alr...
Read more

Hiring

Image
Production Pro is hiring. We are always on the lookout for smart engineers. Apprentice Systems Engineer Transform the way film, theatre and television are created.  We’re looking for a systems engineer with experience designing software systems and algorithms to join our small and mighty team. Click here to watch ProductionPro shake up Silicon Valley for the arts! What we do: Films and plays are complex, creative endeavors, with hundreds of people working together on something that often changes daily. ProductionPro visually assembles all of a production's moving parts into one, dynamic platform – opening the door for a multitude of potential applications in the future. Why we do it: The entertainment industry has been underserved by tech for decades.  ProductionPro exists to help visual storytellers focus on doing what they do best – creating what the world watches. Who we are: Our collaborative team is a medley of experienced software engineer...
Read more

What's in a month? (As far as email goes).

Image
Just in the past month @Google.(4/13-5/13/2013). And that's a bit lower than usual as I took a one day vacation and was two days on an offsite and a week in NYC (note the flatter second week on the sent side). Information overload? The good news is we have great internal systems that help us cope with information. So in actuality this doesn't feel much more different than my private Gmail account which sees only moderate usage (now that I have moved many of the conversations to G+).
Read more