Crowdsourcing the Search for Missing Malaysian Flight

March 11, 2014 By IdeaConnection

800px-PF-15_and_SARV-002_CARAT_2013It’s been three days since flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing.  No fewer than 40 ships and 34 aircraft are taking part in the search. With hundreds of square miles to cover it is an enormous task, one that the crowd can now assist with.

DigitalGlobe is asking members of the public to scan and tag images of more than 1,200 square miles of ocean for any evidence that could help locate the missing plane.

The earth-imagery company directed two of its satellites to photograph an area in the Gulf of Thailand where investigators think the plane may have crashed. It then uploaded them to its crowdsourcing platform Tomnod, for people to tag.

Online Search

Anyone can join in the search by logging onto the platform and then scanning high-resolution images for anything that looks interesting such as possible signs of wreckage or a life craft.

This isn’t the first time DigitalGlobe has turned to the crowd in an emergency situation. In November after typhoon Haiyan hit Southeast Asia, DigitialGlob enlisted the public’s help. Users were able to identify 38,000 damaged buildings and more than 100,000 wrecked homes.

In an interview with ABC News, Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe touched on the value of using crowds in this way:

“In many cases the areas covered are so large or things we are looking for are so hard to find that without the help of hundreds of thousands of people online we’d never be able to find them.”


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