A far-flung volunteer search effort for missing Microsoft database researcher Jim Gray by his fellow high-tech professionals has demonstrated an unprecedented array of technological capabilities.

Described as a capable sailor, Jim Gray, 63, was last heard from Jan. 28 when he was making a day trip on his 40-foot sailboat to scatter his mother’s ashes near the Farallon Islands off the coast outside of San Francisco.

Despite numerous aircraft and ships dispatched by the U.S. Coast Guard, its search-and-rescue efforts had turned up evidence of neither man nor boat before a five-day effort was called off Feb. 1.

Nevertheless, collective technological resources from the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and NASA have permitted a continued search of an area ranging over more than 130,000 square miles.

While such efforts out of Silicon Valley have yet to uncover any debris or other evidence of Gray or his red-hulled boat, the Tenacious, they demonstrate an impressive integration of emerging technologies, including satellite imagery, which may have lasting significance as a powerful collaborative disaster-response tool.

Long before his disappearance, Gray was a noted database pioneer who founded and directed Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center, and had also worked at the University of California at Berkeley, IBM, Tandem, and Digital Equipment. In 1998, he won the prestigious Turing Award, for “lasting and major technical importance to the computer field.”

“Every person who goes to an automatic teller machine (ATM) owes a debt to Jim Gray,” said Mike Olson, a vice president of Oracle and spokesman for the search effort. He added that Gray’s “innovative work is spread across computer science.”

Within an hour of having received a mass e-mailing detailing Gray’s disappearance, Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly volunteered Google Earth’s satellite-mapping data to focus on the range of ocean in which Gray had been sailing.

Similarly, DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird satellite was utilized to receive imagery of the region, though scattered clouds hindered its efficacy. The high-resolution imagery was complemented by that taken by a NASA ER-2 aircraft which, having already been scheduled for a training mission, was exploited to assist in the search. Amazon created a special section of its human-volunteer collaborative research engine, Mechanical Turk, to examine the images for any sign of Gray’s boat: The satellite images were downloaded and analyzed for the Tenacious or its debris. Amazon engineers began using imaging software to split photos from a DigitalGlobe satellite into smaller segments for downloading onto Mechanical Turk where, by using their “artificial artificial intelligence,” numerous “Friends of Jim” would be able to scan them from their own computers. Meanwhile employees from Google and other techie firms began processing and studying hundreds of high-resolution images and video shot by the NASA research aircraft. Oracle is part of a group coordinating its efforts through a Tenacious Search blog (at http://openphi.net/tenacious/).

After a bit of training as to how to differentiate clouds, land and open sea from boats and other objects, volunteers could log on and study the imagery for any likely sign of the missing boat. An estimated 6,000-plus volunteers have inspected more than 530,000 images for either forwarding to an expert for further review or elimination for containing nothing of interest.

The mystery has puzzled experts. Gray’s last reported contact was made the morning of his sail, to a family member over Gray’s cell phone from open sea. The weather and water conditions were reportedly clear and calm in the area. The boat reportedly had been stocked with provisions. The route he took is reportedly well-traveled, especially within the 20-plus-mile range of a typical radio distress signal, though no such signal was reported. His boat reportedly also carried a beacon that would automatically activate if the boat sank; no beacon signals have been detected.

The Coast Guard’s search ranged some 132,000 square miles of the Pacific, looking as far south as the Channel Islands, just off Santa Barbara. Experts said weather and ocean-current data suggested that Gray’s boat would have traveled south, whether under sail or simply by drifting. Nearly two weeks after Gray’s disappearance, flyers with his and his boat’s pictures were being posted in Mexico.

Writing in the blog, Olson said the Coast Guard believed debris from the boat “almost certainly” would have been seen had the Tenacious gone down. “It’s likely the boat’s still above water,” he said.
“Everyone I talk to that knows anything about these sorts of things is totally stumped as to how a 40-foot sailboat literally has disappeared without a trace so fast. No distress signals. No debris. Nothing.”