Coast Guard searching for missing Microsoft researcher
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The U.S. Coast Guard continued its search off the coast of San Francisco for boater Jim Gray, a Microsoft researcher missing since Sunday.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Coast Guard is conducting an extensive search for Jim Gray, a senior manager with Microsoft's Silicon Valley research organization, who failed to return from a sailboating trip Sunday off of San Francisco. The Coast Guard said Tuesday that it was continuing to search 4,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and the Farallon Islands, where Gray was reportedly headed in his 40-foot sailboat Tenacious Sunday morning. He was reported missing by his wife that evening when he failed to return to their home in San Francisco as expected. Gray, 63, was hired in 1995 to run Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, also based in San Francisco, where he researches databases and transaction processing systems, according to a biography of him on a Microsoft Web site. His particular focus is on using computers to make scientists more productive in the fields of astronomy, geography, hydrology, oceanography, biology, and health care, the site explains. Gray, who has also worked at such technology companies as IBM, Tandem Computers, and Digital Equipment, won the ACM Turing Award in 1998 for his work on transaction processing. The Coast Guard said it has deployed a C-130 fixed-wing aircraft, an HH-65 Dolphin helicopter, three 87-foot coastal patrol boats, and other equipment to continue the search. It has been assisted by the Alameda County (California) Sheriff's Office. No signs of Gray or the vessel have been found, the Coast Guard said. The phone at the eScience Group's office went unanswered when IDG News Service called for comment.
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MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. - The Coast Guard on Friday suspended its search for six boaters and said it was investigating the distress calls about their small craft taking on water as a possible hoax.
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(InfoWorld) - What do cats and Internet security have in common? If you had attended Microsoft's TechFest 2007 on Tuesday in Redmond, Washington, you would know. At the event, which gave Microsoft Research a chance to demonstrate technologies that may one day turn up in Microsoft or third-party products, the research group out of Redmond, Washington, showed off Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), a technology that uses the identification of photos of cats to ensure that humans, not interactive scripts, are accessing certain Web sites. The problem with human interactive proof (HIP) technologies used today is that they often ask Web users to identify characters, not images, said Jeremy Elson, who works in the Redmond lab of Microsoft Research. HIP technologies are used by Web sites to ensure someone signing up for a blog or for a service is human, not a software program that wants to spam other users of that service or site. Some of the most common ones display a word that appears slightly distorted. However, "it's easy for software to recognize characters" and pass for a human, Elson said. But the Microsoft Research team decided that a foolproof way to identify Web users as a humans versus software programs was to ask them to identify the difference between dogs and cats from images served up on a site. The group teamed with Petfinder to use its database of photos of dogs and cats as the test images. In return, under each photo, an "adopt me" link can take the user to the Petfinder.com site so they can actually look into adopting the animal they have chosen. Anyone interested in using Asirra can download it from this Web site and test the software, Elson said. Asirra was one of a host of technologies out of Microsoft Research on display at TechFest Tuesday. It was the first time the event was open to the public, and more than 300 attendees -- comprised of press, analysts, bloggers, and curiosity seekers -- spent the day on Microsoft's campus in Redmond hearing about and seeing firsthand the work of various research teams. While not every project the 800 researchers spread across five Microsoft Research centers worldwide make it into Microsoft commercial products, researchers and Microsoft product teams are constantly in touch to see how they can work together, said Andrew Herbert, a Microsoft distinguished engineer and director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. "Technology transfer is a contact sport," he said. "You need a lot of contact [with product teams], and you make close contact." Although there are about five reviews of Microsoft Research projects per year by top Microsoft product leaders -- including Chairman Bill Gates -- sometimes it's "simply persistence" that gets technology created by Microsoft Research into a product, said Kevin Scofield, general manager of Microsoft Research. One of the technology areas that was of particular focus at Tuesday's event is one from Microsoft's front lines -- search engines. Microsoft Research demonstrated several projects that aim to improve Internet search, and at least one of those technologies -- which attempts to make searches more relevant -- will likely wind up in Windows Live Search. That technology, called Query Projections, was developed by the Adaptive System and Interaction team at Microsoft Research in Redmond. The technology, as demonstrated by Jurij Leskovec, a Carnegie Mellon computer science student who worked as an intern on the project, creates graphs that map the relationships between links served up when a Web user poses a search query. These graphs are used to see how many of the top search results are actually the most relevant ones for that query, he said. Dan Liegblig, who also worked on Query Projections, said his team talks daily with the Windows Live Search product team and hopes to use its work to improve the relevancy of results delivered by Microsoft's search engine. However, no timeline has been set for when that might happen, he said. Another search technology on display came out of the Integrated Systems Team in Cambridge. That project, called InSite Live, displays a visual graph of a Web site's site map and can show, using graphics of pushpins or by highlighting parts of the site, which areas of the site deliver information to search queries. This graph can be used to show Web site administrators what areas visitors are most interested in, so they might be able to provide better or more information on those pages, said Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, one of the team's researchers. While Microsoft may be trying to cook up new search technologies toÂ compete with Google, one area in which the company surpasses the search leader is in its open-door policy that lets outsiders get a glimpse of corporate culture, said one TechFest attendee. Opening up TechFest to people outside the company for the first time is one example of that, said Brad Neuberg, an independent researcher in the San Francisco Bay Area. "Something that's really refreshing about Microsoft is their corporate culture has really opened up," he said. "The joke in the Bay Area is that if you're at a party with someone from Google and you ask them 'What are you working on?' they will say, 'I can't tell you.' You rarely encounter that with Microsoft and Yahoo." TechFest continues on Wednesday and Thursday, when it is open only to Microsoft employees.
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People here have come together to try to find an 11-year-old boy missing since September, with two important exceptions: his father, and the father's live-in girlfriend.
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To: TECHNOLOGY EDITORS  Contact: Carmeyia Gillis of NOAA, +1-301-763-8000, ext.7163, or Michael Corrado of IBM, +1-914-766-4635   WASHINGTON, Jan.
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By CRAIG BROWN  AIR and sea rescuers were searching for a missing teenage canoeist last night after his craft was found washed up on a beach on the Isle of Lewis.
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Jamaican military forces searched on Wednesday for dozens of fishermen feared missing after Hurricane Ivan&#39;s strike on the Caribbean island last weekend, officials said.
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Police appeal for help in finding a nine-year-old boy, who has been missing since Saturday.
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Coastguards search for two crew from a tug which is thought to have sunk in the River Clyde.
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The Philippine coastguard was searching on Monday for 28 Chinese fishermen missing after their ship sank off the northwestern coast, an official said.
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An IT firm is investigating how a hard drive from the Driving Standards Agency went missing in its US premises.
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Computing pioneer lost Coastguards in northern California are planning to call off the search for missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray early on Thursday. He went missing on a sailing trip off San Francisco Bay on Sunday.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is investigating a missing hard drive containing the personal records of 48,000 military veterans, the agency said. The external hard drive contained about 20,000 personal records that were not encrypted, according to information from U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican. A VA employee reported the hard drive missing from an agency Birmingham, Alabama, facility on Jan. 22, according to a VA press release. The VA and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation are investigating the missing hard drive, the VA said in its Friday press release. The VA's Office of Information and Technology is conducting a separate investigation, Jim Nicholson, VA's secretary, said in a statement. "We intend to get to the bottom of this, and we will take aggressive steps to protect and assist anyone whose information may have been involved," Nicholson added. In May, the VA reported a laptop and hard drive containing the personal records of 26.5 million military veterans and their families had beenÂ stolen from an employee's home. Police laterÂ recovered the hardware, and the VA said computer forensics tests indicated thieves had not accessed the data, but the theft set off criticism from several members of Congress about theÂ VA's cybersecurity practices. The hard drive in Alabama was used to back up information contained on an employeeâs office computer, and may have contained data from research projects the employee was involved in, as well as personal information, the VA said. The VA Office of Inspector General has seized the employeeâs computer and is analyzing its contents, the VA said. The VA is prepared to notify affected people and provide free credit monitoring, the agency said. The VA will continue to aim to be a leader in protecting personal information, Nicholson said in his statement. In August, the VA also reported that a desktop computer containing the personal information of 38,000 veterans was missing from the office of Unisys Corp., the subcontractor assisting at the agency's medical centers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The lost VA hardware prompted a congressional review of other U.S. government agencies, and agencies reported thousands of laptops missing in the last five years.
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The Coast Guard planned to call off its search early Thursday for an acclaimed computer scientist whose sailboat has disappeared off Northern California.
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Police were searching for an American diplomat reported missing on the Mediterranean island, authorities said Sunday.
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Several hundred rescue workers, including about 130 civilian volunteers, took turns yesterday searching for an autistic 15-year-old from Millis who was reported missing from his home Friday.