[ESIP-all] URGENT: calling all image interpreters/exploiters

[James Frew]

Hello ESIP Federation,

As you may know, Jim Gray (Turing awardee and one of the fathers of 
modern database technology) sailed out of San Francisco a week ago and 
hasn't been seen since (see http://tinyurl.com/3ab6a8 for news 
coverage). After 4 days of searching more than 100,000 square miles, the 
Coast Guard suspended searching for him (see http://tinyurl.com/3azgyx 
), pending any credible leads.

Many of Jim's friends and colleagues have self-assembled online for the 
purpose of generating exactly those leads. With help from MDA 
Geospatial, Google, and NASA, we've acquire RADARSAT, QuickBird (0.6m 
pan), and ER-2 (2m vis/IR) imagery of areas where Jim's boat might have 
been. Groups at MBARI and JPL have set up current/wind models that we 
can seed with any sightings to predict where Jim's boat is now, which is 
what the Coast Guard needs to resume the search.

Here's where you-all come in.

1) All the raw imagery is available via FTP. If you have some expertise 
in small (i.e. 1..10x resolution) target extraction from visible or 
radar imagery, please consider applying it to this problem.

2) The non-radar imagery has been tiled into Amazon.com's "Mechanical 
Turk", where ~1500 possible sightings have been identified by volunteers 
on the web. We need image interpreters to evaluate these identifications 
and winnow them down to serious potential sightings.

If you would like to participate in either of these activities, please email

David Tennenhouse <dtennenhouse at ieee.org>

who's coordinating our image interpretation/exploitation activity, and 
cc me:

James Frew <frew at bren.ucsb.edu>

so he knows you're jumping into this at my invitation and aren't some 
random web crazy (unfortunately those are already starting to crawl out 
of the woodwork.) Give a *brief* summary of your qualifications and what 
you'd like to work on, and David (or I, if I catch it first) will send 
the appropriate URLs.

Thanks a bunch (and sorry for spamming your super-sunday),
/Frew