Complexity and Social Networks Blog

Teams turned up nothing, not so much as a shard of aluminum hull or a swatch of sail from Dr. Gray’s 40-foot sailboat, Tenacious.
In the meantime, as word swept through the high-technology community, dozens of Dr. Gray’s colleagues, friends and former students began banding together on Monday to supplement the Coast Guard’s efforts with the tool they know best: computer technology.
The flurry of activity, which began in earnest on Tuesday, escalated as the days and nights passed. A veritable Who’s Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels.
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On Tuesday evening, as the Coast Guard’s search continued, Joseph M. Hellerstein, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, sent out an e-mail message with the subject: “Urgent ... Jim Gray.” One recipient, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, wrote back within an hour, and offered to enlist Google Earth’s satellite imaging expertise.
By Wednesday, Professor Hellerstein had started a blog and earth sciences experts at the Ames Research Center of NASA in Moffett Field, Calif., had sprung into action. They secured the promise of help from a high-altitude aircraft equipped with a high-resolution digital camera that was already scheduled for a flight Friday from Dryden Research Center in Southern California but whose pilot could make sure his path included the search area.
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“The number of people who feel they owe him in so many ways, personally and professionally, as a role model and friend is incredible,” Professor Hellerstein said.
Dr. Gray is a leader in the field of database systems and transaction processing and has received several computer science awards, including the prestigious Turing Award in 1998.
And there is an infinitesimal degree of separation between Dr. Gray and nearly everyone involved in the search for him.
“Nearly every major research project he worked on has been hugely influential on later research and products,” said Phil Bernstein, a principal researcher at Microsoft who is a colleague of Dr. Gray.