The power of the masses

I have been particularily fascinated with the search for the wealthy adventurer, Steve Fossett. For those unfamiliar with the story, Fossett was known for breaking all sorts of land and air records and has been missing since his plane took off for a routine scouting flight in the Nevada desert. Being well connected and well known, people are using the latest in technology to find him.

This reminds me of the search for Jim Gray, the former computer science professor who also worked at Microsoft Research and IBM (as well as other companies). I read about the search for him in Wired magazine. He was lost at sea at the beginning of the year and the tech world rallied around his search. The latest in communication and satellite technologies were used to find him. It appears that they are doing the same thing for Steve Fossett. In fact, we as common citizens with spare time and bandwidth can join in the search for him using software and computational power from Amazon.com (Search for Steve Fossett link).

The problem with the latest in technology is that it still hasn't gotten to the point where computers can identify objects in complex backgrounds as easily as the human eye. I guess that is the purpose for the call for help in searching for him online using human eyeballs. People all over the world can look for him without leaving their computer. That's pretty cool.

It makes me think of the problems we have with detecting cancer in patients. Many cancer diagnoses and tumor staging are still done by human eye. In this way, detecting cancer in patients using images is essentially the same problem as the search for Steve Fossett and Jim Gray. It all depends on the eyes of the doctor and/or medical technician.

Even though lots of people (including me) are working on other (biochemical) ways of detecting cancer, the human eye is still state of the art.

Update: They called off the search for Steve Fossett yesterday (Sept 20). It looks like this search has gone the same as the search for Jim Gray. One thing about these searches is that it seems like they seem to develop new tools and get them out faster with each subsequent search. Of course I hope they never have to use these tools again, but I have the feeling that they probably will, and hopefully next time we find the person quickly and in good condition.