BYU improving software to find lost hikers

This looks interesting and promising.

Searchers could find lost hikers faster with help from a computer program that brings a modern touch to algorithms used to find lost people since World War II.
The new software, under development at Brigham Young University, takes into account the spot where a hiker was last seen, the nature of the landscape and GPS track logs of others who have bushwhacked the same terrain. Those logs can show how terrain steers hikers one way or another.
"A lot of search and rescue has a fairly mathematical component," said BYU professor Michael Goodrich.

The news article is here and the link to the tech model (A Bayesian Approach to Modeling Lost Person Behaviors Based on Terrain Features in Wilderness Search and Rescue) is here. (google docs)

Yes, very interesting. I rather recoil at the thought of human behaviour being reduced to a computer algorithm. Though in a lost/survival situation, we basically run that sort of algorithm in our heads. Only with more random factors, like walking in circles.

Given all the information already in GIS databases, you could run this software to get a rapid, theoretical list of "hot spots" for a person's location at a certain time frame. Could save lives and a lot of time and money too. If it really works.

It would be a wonderful SAR training tool. Input a true scenario and have search managers pit their experience against the model's predictions. Then compare both to the actual outcome. That would be very interesting indeed.

Absolutely true. When I was doing SAR (many moons ago), one of our number was a professor in the mathematics department at the U of Arizona. His expertise came in handy on many occasions. When I left town, we were just beginning to bring portable computers to base camp.

Back then, we used early versions of the algorithms mentioned in the article to very good effect in working more effectively to shorten the search effort.

I did grin when I read "the new software takes into account the nature of the landscape." In our home terrain, we realized very soon that some of our mountainous terrain absolutely determines travel routes for lost individuals. Their movements (and, to a large extent, ours as well) were controlled by the mountain canyons as surely as an aqueduct delivers water.

Over time, it was rather fascinating to see how patterns in how, when and where people got lost and into trouble developed.