Werner Vogels has a post on the use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to help find Microsoft researcher and transaction processing pioneer Jim Gray. If you don’t know who Jim Gray is, its worth checking out his web page at Microsoft Research.

I met Jim at the Yukon Airlift (SQL Server 2005 preview) out in Redmond. It was early 2003 as I recall. Jim spent time at the event talking about his scalability work with SQL Server (before Virtual Earth or Google Earth, anyone remember TerraServer?) and some of his early work with Yukon for high-scale applications. A very nice guy and very down to earth.

 Please spend some time today working to find Jim Gray.

UPDATE- It appears that there are no more HITS (Human Intelligence Tasks) left to be completed. Let’s hope that this effort helps to discover the whereabouts of Jim Gray.