Help Save Steve Fossett! Mechanical Turk Offers Hope

The search for Steve Fossett has taken a new technological turn. In an effort to get more volunteers and more eyes on the land over which Fossett disappeared the authorities have employed Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

When entering the HIT, Human Intelligence Task, you are prompted to view with either Google Earth for better detail or continue with the present images. The participant is then asked whether the image contains anything of interest and then asked to clarify in a comment box. The online volunteer is comforted with the fact that the same image will be given to others so to not feel as if because they didn't spot something it has tragic consequences.

The online volunteers are asked to study these several satellite images, each square representing a 278,000 square feet of the area being presently searched. They are also given the dimensions of Fossett's plane and what it may look like on a satellite image.

Amazon, the popular marketplace website, has a subsidiary called Mechanical Turk. This service offers an opportunity to get paid to do different tasks. These tasks can vary anywhere from create a trivia question to finding a UPC code for venetian blinds. The pay for each task is usually very small, about .04 -.07 a HIT. This program is an effort to integrate Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence. The software incorporates the answers to the task requests, done by humans, into its software. Payment is delivered via an Amazon account, a must.

Richard Branson, billionaire, and good friend to the record breaking aviator, initiated the online invitation and search in hopes of finding his friend sooner.

Steve Fossett has been missing since September 3, when leaving in search of a destination for an attempt to break a land speed record failed to file a flight plan.

"No sign of Missing Millionaire Adventurer", NPR Reports, The Associated Press
www.npr.org

Amazon Mechanical Turk
www.mtruk.com