Feb 4: Crowdsourcing the search for missing sailor
The renowned computer scientist and Turing award winner James N. Gray has been reported missing on sea after not returning from a solo boat trip outside San Francisco Bay on January 28, 2007. The coast guard of California searched for his vessel a couple of days, but did not succeed in finding any signs of his boat. Since he has water and food supply for some time, chances are not too bad to find him alive even after being lost for a week now. Thus a big effort is made by lot of people at various places - among them Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com) - to find him on the ocean using any intelligence data available. The search mission focuses primarily on the analysis of satellite and spy plane images. Since a huge area of ocean was captured, thousands of images need to be examined for a some pixel sized boat shape, which cannot be done reliably by image processing software, because the noise of waves and clouds masks possible hits. Thus the images were split into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned by a human. These tiles were made availabe at the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service, which provides a platform for exactly this kind of tasks.
Artificial artificial intelligence
The Mechanical Turk is a commercial service by Amazon that lets users assign various little tasks to helpers - in the Amazon jargon called Turkers. These Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) are typically repetitive and require almost no special skills but having a brain. This is also the reason why computers are not capable of solving these tasks, since in some rare cases the human brain is still superior to silicon chips. Hurray, the machines still need us.. (-:
The name Mechanical Turk is derived from an 18th century hoax robotic chess player. Its inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen claimed that his automaton - called The Turk - was intelligent enough to beat even best chess players, but it turned out to be controlled by a human chess master which was hidden inside the box (see picture). Likewise, Amazon's Mechanical Turk service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren't capable of, yet.
Among typical Mechanical Turk tasks are image annotation, simple yes-no-questions or selecting one of possible alternatives. More time consuming jobs include transcription of podcasts or producing text content for blogs, trivia questions or restaurant critics. Since most of the HITs are no-brainers and can be done in almost no time, the reward is typically far below one dollar per HIT. Only by completing a considerable number of HITs the Turkers can supplement their income, which has been one of the main critics about this service. But typically Turkers do their mechanical work in their free time and not as a major source of income.
In the case of the satellite image analysis for searching Jim's boat, no reward is offered at all for completing HITs, because its completely based on volunteer's work. As of February 4th, over 6000 individual workers examined over 100.000 assignments.
I have completed over 100 HITs for myself and it is truly fascinating helping in a rescue mission from my comfortable chair at home. Weird, huh? (-: It seems to be one of the phenomena of Web 2.0 and all of that social network stuff. The Wired magazine titled a story The Rise of Crowdsourcing about this new form of outsourcing jobs among people on the Internet. I think it is a very cool way of getting stupid work done that computers won't do and the Amazon Mechanical Turk seems to be a good prototype for such a generic task distribution platform.
After all, I hope the story comes to a good end and Jim is finally found even if chances are decreasing with every day.
Update
More than 12,000 volunteers participated in the image analysis and completed altogether more than 560,000 asignments. Unfortunately no signs of Jim's boat were found. Since the other search efforts had no luck as well, the active search has been suspended.
