Jim Gray is a world renowned computer scientist and database software guru. He literally wrote the book on databases and transaction processing. Now the world's scientists are using satellites, NASA radar planes, and the best technology in the world to help find him. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, are just a few of the many technology gurus offering help. 
The New York Times said "A veritable Who’s Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA 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."
A blog called Tenacious Search has been set up to collect information and coordinate search efforts. Tom Barclay, Jim's longtime research associate, sent an email message to friends of Jim. He said "
A number of folks on the distribution list have discussed the possibility of acquiring satellite data. Jim Frew at UCSB has been working SPOT Image to acquire some 5m data the next time the bird is over the search area. The Microsoft Virtual Earth Team is working with GeoEye and Digital Globe to acquire imagery on the next pass. They and others are also investigating the feasibility of acquiring SAR scenes as well. Sergey at Google has offered their assistance as well. NASA is working on getting there vis/ir camera on an ER-2. All of our satellite friends are concerned about fog and clouds; and/or ability to find a little red-hulled / white deck boat in a sea of gray pixels. Still, all of us with any bit of satellite experience are willing to take a shot regardless of the low probability of success.
We have received a number of offers from private pilots to mount a private search. We have begun to organize a search starting tomorrow (Thursday). We’ve hired a plane from HJW to fly the coastline from north of Bodega Bay to Monterey Bay looking in every cove, inlet, and rock cropping. A friend of Mike Ubell and Paula Hawhtorn with a plane is also going to fly the coast line to the south. The same friend hooked us up with a few pilots from the Coast Guard Auxiliary. They believe we can get two larger, twin-engine planes in the air heading out over deeper water once the fog lifts around 11am or noon tomorrow. Bottom line we will have four planes out during most of the “flyable” day tomorrow.
I have known Jim Gray and Tom Barclay for 20 years. We worked together at Digital Equipment Corp in the Database Systems Group back in 1987, and we now all work at Microsoft, although in different groups. Jim is the smartest guy I have ever worked with, and also the most friendly and humble. Jim received the Turing Award in 1998, the Nobel Prize for computer science. I met with Jim in his San Francisco office shortly after he won the award. He had a plaque and a picture from the award ceremony sitting on the floor behind a bunch of computer science journals. I asked him about it and he just shrugged and said "Well, my daughter is very proud of me...that is all that matters".
The smartest guy I ever met also understood the simple things in life and what is really important.
Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site to help review satellite images. You will be asked to look at 5 images and determine if they should be examined more closely by the search team. The images will look like this. Jim's boat would be about the size of the red rectangle. 
I reviewed a few sets satellite images, accepting a few hits.
Posted by: Lloyd Budd | February 04, 2007 at 05:28 PM