LAS VEGAS: Up to 50,000 people are hunting for missing aviator
Steve Fossett, in a distributed search using satellite images
and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
The army of online volunteers is scrutinizing satellite images
that show small chunks of the 17,000-square-mile region where
Fossett's plane is thought to have crashed.
The "distributed search" uses satellite images from DigitalGlobe,
the company that provides images for Google Earth.
The helpers are issued squares that represent 278-foot-square
pieces of the search area. If they see something worth closer
study, participants flag it. Since each square is issued to
10 different people, squares that are flagged by several volunteers
are given greater scrutiny.
One of the heartiest of participants is 25-year-old software
designer Andy Chantrill of Castle Donington, England, who worked
on it for 13 straight hours on Monday and says he's put in 30
total hours examining about 5,000 squares.
"I've tagged about a dozen things that I thought deserved
closer inspection," said Chantrill, who describes himself as
a Fossett admirer. "Whether they were or not, I don't know and
will perhaps never know, but it's the group effort that counts.
Collaborative efforts like these can be extremely powerful tools."
Amazon has a policy of not releasing the number of participants
in Mechanical Turk projects. But Wired News has learned that
up to 50,000 people have joined the distributed search since
it began on Friday.
Amazon was happy to release the number of satellite images
that have been scrutinized: more than 2 million, according to
the company.
"This is unique, being able to quickly employ a network of
people to do this," said Peter Cohen, who directs such projects
for Amazon. "It represents an amazing ability to employ a network
of people to work collaboratively to solve this problem. In
this case, we're trying to identify anything in these millions
of images that might be an airplane."
The assistance is welcome by the Civil Air Patrol Nevada Wing,
which is leading a search that entered its eighth day on Tuesday.
"It doesn't look like complete nonsense, and at this point,
we're going to entertain any real help we can get," Civil Air
Patrol Nevada Wing Maj. Cynthia S. Ryan said.
This is the second time Amazon has organized a search using
this method. The first time was in February, when Microsoft
computer guru Jim Gray went missing while in a sailboat off
the coast of San Francisco. He was never found and is presumed
dead.
In the current case, satellite data from Google Earth was
enlisted by Fossett friend and Virgin Group owner Richard Branson.
On Friday, before the group effort was launched, Branson said
he was discouraged that the data had failed to spot anything.
He could not be reached again for this report.
There are more than 300,000 squares in the map. Each square
is viewed 10 times, and the entire map has been re-entered at
least three times as newer satellite pictures of the area have
become available. For that reason, Cohen said, the project may
never be completed, but he does believe the entire map has been
reviewed at least once.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing web service, is
named after an 18th-century chess-playing mannequin dressed
as a Turkish man. The mannequin's moves were controlled from
within by a chess master using gears and pulleys, but opponents
didn't know how it worked -- as Cohen calls it, "artificial
artificial intelligence." Today's Mechanical Turk is typically
used for tasks ranging from transcribing an audio file to writing
a restaurant review.
