Planes from numerous countries are scouring the Atlantic Ocean looking for signs of the Airbus 330 that recently disappeared en-route from Brazil to France. The search is relying upon a report of another passenger flight seeing something in the ocean, and has been limited by the inevitable setting of the sun. This got us thinking: there has got to be a more efficient way to conduct the search.
While the current on-the-ground search should, of course, be continued, these efforts could easily tap into the power of the crowd to put thousands of eyes to work -- both around the world, and around the clock. Utilizing real-time satellite images, people anywhere could zoom into specific regions of these photographs and scour them for signs of wreckage. Because everything is GPS-referenced, users could then tag any areas that show signs of the plane, and this information would be accessible to those conducting the search in the area of interest. This would increase efficiency in two ways: firstly, it would increase the overall number of people participating in the search for debris, and secondly, it would allow those with specific search and rescue expertise to focus in on regions that are noted of interest, rather than dispersing their focus throughout the entire Ocean. Adam Smith would be proud of this division of labor: it would allow hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens to focus on a specific task that contributes to the whole search process, while those with search-expertise can focus on specific areas with their equipment rather than disperse their expertise and their resources throughout the Atlantic.
What do you think? How else could search efforts like this tap into "The Crowd?" Leave your thoughts in our comments section!
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Alex Budak is a recent graduate of UCLA and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Public Policy at Georgetown University, with a focus on Technology and Social Entrepreneurship. He is joining The Extraordinaries this summer as a Research Fellow.
This is not a new idea. In January 28, 2007, Computer Scientist Jim Gray's boat disappeared near S.Francisco, and On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images. The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to distribute the work of searching through them, in hopes of spotting his boat.
I myself looked upon some images, trying to spot anything suspect.
Infortunately, the boar was never found.
Posted by: Jorge Medes | June 03, 2009 at 03:14 AM
Understood that it's not a new idea. In the search for Steve Fosset, they did the same thing. But why wasn't this system used for Air France? Is there an inherent problem with it? Is is too expensive? Does satellite imagery not exist or is it hard to get? Or is there just no ready infrastructure/promotional mechanism to get it done?
Posted by: Ben Rigby | June 03, 2009 at 12:18 PM
Re: This is not a new idea.
Like many great uses of technology, the Extraodinaries' model of micro-volunteering takes the concept of something that already exists (distributed workload in this case) and gives it an infrastructure and an audience. With the two latter components in place, the concept of distributed contribution can be applied in completely new arenas.
Posted by: Tony Goodrow | June 03, 2009 at 07:51 PM
s is too expensive? Does satellite imagery not exist or is it hard to get? Or is there just no ready infrastructure/promotional mechanism to get it done?With the two latter components in place, the concept of distributed contribution can be applied in completely new arenas.
Posted by: cheap mesos for maple story | June 19, 2009 at 01:12 AM
This is not a new idea. In January 28, 2007, Computer Scientist Jim Gray's boat disappeared near S.Francisco, and On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images. The images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to distribute the work of searching through them, in hopes of spotting his boat.
Posted by: kinah aion | June 30, 2009 at 08:36 PM