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.