[tt] 50, 000 Volunteers Join Distributed Search For Steve Fossett using Amazon Mechanical Turk

[Brian Atkins]

http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/09/distributed_search

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."

Since Friday, when the distributed search began, up to 50,000 people have joined 
in, according to a source helping coordinate the effort who requested anonymity. 
More than more than 2 million squares have been scrutinized, Amazon says.

"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.

-- 
Brian Atkins
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/