Valentin's Blog

This morning I spend some time trying to find Jim Gray. Jim Gray is renowned computer scientist that went missing after a solo trip with his sail boat. A group of people got together to organize a satellite run over the area where he is suspected, they separated the picture into many tiles and through Amazons Mechanical Turk site you can volunteer to analyze this data; try to find foreign objects on the satellite pictures. You can read more about it here.

Sadly I didn't find anything that looked really promising - I hope someone else has more luck.

However, I think that this kind of "crowdsourcing of surveillance" has a big future - the next time a large number of surveillance tapes need to be looked at fast after a terrorist attack - why not let volunteers do it? Have Israeli citizens see real time surveillance footage to look out for rocket launchers in Lebanon? Have relatives of soldiers back home monitor the perimeter of bases while the soldiers rest? US citizens can already help monitor the southern border from an Internet computer.

Labels: Web