LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - Call in the crowd! Artificial intelligence is now being used in the form of Amazon Mechanical Turk to track Steve’s position. The idea is to complete simple tasks that people do better than computers by splitting up the images into tiny squares and getting 1000s of humans to remotely check them. Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.

You will be shown a single satellite image. The task is to flag any satellite images which contain foreign objects that may resemble Steve’s airplane or parts of a plane. Steve’s plane will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 21 pixels long and 30 pixels in wingspan.

-Robin-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - The Red Bull X-Alps challenge has started. The race requires athletes to travel as fast as possible from Austria to Monte Carlo by foot & paraglider only. Effectively they run/walk up mountains then jump off and fly as far as they can. Land & repeat.

There are no Irish entrants this year, but the photo above I took of the London Metro shows the UK entries. One UK pilot ‘Aidan Toase’ is currently in 2nd place.

I recommend you check out the live tracking it’s fantastic to watch as they all choose different peaks to climb, different valley’s to fly down. If you import into Google Earth you can see their altitude too and their updraft spirals are easily identified in the GPS tracklog.

Closer to home, the Red Bull Air Race takes place on the stretch of Thames outside my office this weekend.

-Robin-