DoI: 10.1145/1965724.1965744
The volunteer search for Jim Gray, lost at
sea in 2007, highlights the challenges
of computer-aided emergency response.
BY JoSEPh M. hELLERSTEIn AnD DAVID L. TEnnEnhouSE
(on BEhALF oF A LARGE TEAM oF VoLun TEERS)
Searching
for Jim Gray:
A Technical
overview
On sunDAy JAnuAry 28, 2007, noted computer
scientist Jim Gray disappeared at sea in his sloop
Tenacious. He was sailing singlehanded, with plans to
scatter his mother’s ashes near the Farallon Islands,
some 27 miles outside San Francisco’s Golden Gate.
As news of Gray’s disappearance spread through his
social network, his friends and colleagues began discussing ways to mobilize their skills and resources to help
authorities locate Tenacious and rescue Gray. That discussion evolved over
days and weeks into an unprecedented
civilian search-and-rescue (SARa) exercise involving satellites, private planes,
automated image analysis, ocean current simulations, and crowdsourced
human computing, in collaboration
with the U.S. Coast Guard. The team
that emerged included computer scientists, engineers, graduate students,
oceanographers, astronomers, busi-
a SAR also refers to synthetic aperture radar, a
remote-imaging technology employed in the
search for Tenacious; using it here, we refer exclusively to search-and-rescue.
ness leaders, venture capitalists, and
entrepreneurs, many of whom had
never met one another before. There
was ample access to funds, technol-
key insights
Loosely coupled teams quickly evolved
software polytechtures with varying
interfaces, decoupling data acquisition
from analysis to enable use of expertise
at a distance.
The u.S. Coast Guard developed software
to aid search and rescue and is an
interesting potential research partner for
computer scientists.
new open-source tools and research
could help with group coordination,
crowdsourced image acquisition, high-
volume image processing,
ocean drift modeling, and analysis
of open-water satellite imagery.