Hello everyone, Received this from a CS student we all know and thought to share it with you all. Best wishes, Alison -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Massive effort to find Turing winner Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 13:36:21 -0500 Anyone with an Internet connection and little extra time can help find Jim Gray, see: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/02/help_find_jim_gray.html or, check the latest blog entries about the search http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=Jim+gray <http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=Jim+gray> Thomas McLeod NY Times February 3, 2007 *Silicon Valley?s High-Tech Hunt for Colleague * By KATIE HAFNER <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/katie_hafner/index.html?inline=nyt-per> SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 2 When James Gray failed to return home from a sailing trip on Sunday night, Silicon Valley?s best and brightest went out to help find him. After all, Dr. Gray, 63, a Microsoft <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=MSFT> researcher, is one of their own. The United States Coast Guard, which started a search Sunday night, suspended it on Thursday, after sending aircraft and boats to scour 132,000 square miles of ocean, stretching from the Channel Islands in Southern California to the Oregon border. Teams turned up nothing, not so much as a shard of aluminum hull or a swatch of sail from Dr. Gray?s 40-foot sailboat, Tenacious. In the meantime, as word swept through the high-technology community, dozens of Dr. Gray?s colleagues, friends and former students began banding together on Monday to supplement the Coast Guard?s efforts with the tool they know best: computer technology. The flurry of activity, which began in earnest on Tuesday, escalated as the days and nights passed. A veritable Who?s Who of computer scientists from Google <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=GOOG>, Amazon <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=AMZN>, Microsoft, NASA <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_aeronautics_and_space_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org> and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels. Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. ?This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,? said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue. On Tuesday evening, as the Coast Guard?s search continued, Joseph M. Hellerstein, a computer science professor at the University of California <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_california/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, Berkeley, sent out an e-mail message with the subject: ?Urgent ... Jim Gray.? One recipient, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, wrote back within an hour, and offered to enlist Google Earth <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/earth_planet/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>?s satellite imaging expertise. By Wednesday, Professor Hellerstein had started a blog and earth sciences experts at the Ames Research Center of NASA in Moffett Field, Calif., had sprung into action. They secured the promise of help from a high-altitude aircraft equipped with a high-resolution digital camera that was already scheduled for a flight Friday from Dryden Research Center in Southern California but whose pilot could make sure his path included the search area. By Thursday morning, in response to calls from Google, NASA and the Coast Guard, DigitalGlobe, an imaging company in Longmont, Colo., had commanded its satellite to capture images of strips of the coastline based on the most likely areas where Dr. Gray?s boat might have drifted. Throughout the day, Dr. Gray?s friends sent out low-flying private planes to search the ocean and hidden coves along the coastline that the Coast Guard planes might not have been able to reach. By Friday morning, more planes were sent out. Dr. Gray, a renowned computer scientist and skilled amateur sailor, set out on a calm, clear morning last Sunday for a daylong trip to the Farallon Islands west of the Golden Gate, to scatter his mother?s ashes. His wife, Donna Carnes, reported him missing at 8:35 Sunday night. As of Friday there was still no trace of him. Professor Hellerstein said it was unusual for him and his circle of colleagues to feel so helpless. ?It?s a group of people who are used to getting stuff done,? he said of the highly accomplished group of dozens of computer scientists who have stepped in to help. ?We build stuff. We build companies. We write software. And when there are bugs we fix them.? The intense search is also a testament to the reverence with which Dr. Gray is regarded among computer scientists. And it speaks volumes about the unusually strong glue that binds the technical community. ?The number of people who feel they owe him in so many ways, personally and professionally, as a role model and friend is incredible,? Professor Hellerstein said. Dr. Gray is a leader in the field of database systems and transaction processing and has received several computer science awards, including the prestigious Turing Award in 1998. And there is an infinitesimal degree of separation between Dr. Gray and nearly everyone involved in the search for him. ?Nearly every major research project he worked on has been hugely influential on later research and products,? said Phil Bernstein, a principal researcher at Microsoft who is a colleague of Dr. Gray. Mike Olson, vice president for embedded technology at the Oracle Corporation <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/technology/http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=ORCL>, who has worked with Dr. Gray on research projects, said Dr. Gray also happened to be a pioneer in applying computer science to data collected from buoys to gauge wind direction and sea surface conditions, as well as satellite imagery. Thursday?s weather posed a problem for the satellite effort, as a layer cake of clouds hovered over the search area. ?There definitely was a significant cloud cover,? said Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe. But because of the high and urgent demand for that particular strip, he said, the shot was taken. Once the satellite?s images were received by imaging experts on Thursday, Digital Globe engineers worked on making them accessible to engineers at Amazon, who divided them into manageable sizes and posted them to Amazon?s Mechanical Turk site, which allows the general public to scrutinize images in search of various objects. ?This is a first sift through these images,? said Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, who had Dr. Gray on his Ph.D. committee at Vrije University in Amsterdam. ?If the volunteers see something, we ask them to please mark the image, and we?ll take all the images that have been marked and review them.? Similarly, Microsoft?s Virtual Earth division, is having satellites capture high-resolution imagery in an area along the coastline and will post the images for volunteers to scrutinize. Microsoft is also collecting radar satellite images which penetrate clouds and is using them together with its Oceanview software, which can automatically detect vessels. Lt. Amy Marrs, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, said that should a volunteer find something in one of the satellite images that appeared to be a ?convincing and tangible? lead, the Coast Guard would follow up. Lieutenant Marrs said it was highly unusual for there to be no trace whatsoever of a missing vessel, not even an oil slick. As the mystery deepened, speculation among the public increased: grief-induced suicide, perhaps, or a heart attack; a run-in with a band of pirates or a pod of orca whales; a collision with a partly sunken cargo container. But most of the computer scientists preferred to remain scientifically sound. As of Friday, the blog dedicated to the search had started filling up with ideas and educated guesses about Dr. Gray?s cellphone, which had transmitted a signal as late as 7:30 Sunday evening, an hour before he was reported missing. And more private planes went up, with a run down the California coastline. Prof. James Frew, an associate professor of environmental information management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has worked with Dr. Gray and is helping to coordinate the search, said he was uncertain at first about how the Coast Guard would react to the scientists? involvement. ?It wouldn?t have surprised me to get a brush off,? Professor Frew said. ?They?re professionals, and they know what they?re doing, and here comes this army of nerds, bashing down the doors. But they?ve dealt with us very nicely.? Several of the scientists said they preferred not to speculate on when they might cease their efforts to find Dr. Gray. ?I prefer to stay concrete and positive for now,? Professor Hellerstein said. -- Alison Pechenick, Lecturer Department of Computer Science College of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences 351 Votey Hall University of Vermont Burlington, VT 05405 (802)656-2547 http://www.cems.uvm.edu/~apecheni