Welcome back!

The site has been "mostly dead" since our hosting company vanished in October 2011, along with their offsite backups.  I've rescued what we could from the internet archive and my hard drive, and I am fixing links and updating text.  Unfortunately, I've lost almost all blog posts since late 2010, so if you remember one, remind me of it.  I'm concentrating on my SAR pages, not my academic research, teaching, or personal pages.     

         -Charles 2012-03-03.

Introduction

The SARBayes project and develop models, algorithms, and software to support missing-persons searches on land, using data that we and others have collected about missing-person behavior and search operations. Slowly.  Some projects include:

• collecting data on Australian searches into an online database
• making and testing Bayesian network models to predict lost-person behavior
• developing a general-purpose library for optimal resource allocation
• (integrating all this search theory into intuitive software)

SARBayes is about search theory, and especially probability maps.  Given a probability map for the current location of the lost person, search theory provides optimal resource allocation algorithms.  But until recently there was no good way to make a probability map for land search. Now there are several approaches, and the MapScore project will provide a way to compare them on actual cases.

The online version of the Australian case data was wiped out with the server.  However, all the cases are now part of ISRID, the International Search & Rescue Incident Database, and we will be using that for our analyses.  We will endeavor to make the Australian cases available again. (ISRID is not.)

Comments are welcome: ctwardy at sarbayes dot org, or ctwardy at alumni dot indiana dot edu