Half a Million Assignments Completed.

Over 530,000 Mechanical Turk assignments have been completed by more than 12,000 volunteers in the search for Jim Gray. We need a little more of a push and then all the images will have been processed. A team of experts lead by Alex Szalay of John Hopkins University has been working through the thousands of images marked for further investigation. They currently have a set of about 20 images that are being further scrutinized before they will be handed to Coast Guard for determining whether they can take action on them.

Scientists from JPL and CCMOP have developed drift models for the area such that Coast Guard can use that information to determine where objects seen on the satellite images may have drifted to in the past days.

Jim Gray with his colleagues Gianfranco Putzulo and Irving Traiger in the late '70' / early '80s when they did groundbreaking work on concurrency control for databases (image courtesy of Heather Gray)

Update: After 560,000 assignments all images have been reviewed and this Mechanical Turk Hit group is all out of work. This was a tremendous effort by many,many volunteers. The experts continue to review the results to narrow down the possibilities.