DARPA Network Challenge
The challenge was designed to help the military generate ideas for operating under a range of circumstances, such as natural disasters.
In the competition, teams had to locate ten red balloons placed around the United States and then report their findings to DARPA.
Due to the distributed nature of the contest, many teams used online resources, such as social media sites, to gather information or to recruit people that would look for balloons.
The contest was concluded in under nine hours, much less than expected by DARPA, and had many implications with regards to the power of online social networking and crowdsourcing in general.
Part of the purpose of the challenge was to force participants to discern actual pertinent information from potential noise.
One valid strategy was spamming social networks with false reports to throw competitors off the trail of real sightings.
The ability of many to do so showed the effectiveness of mass and social media to distribute information and organize people quickly.
[3] A detailed analysis of the winning strategy highlighted the important role that social media played.
[8] The second-place GTRI team used a strategy that relied heavily on Internet publicity and social media.
However, due to the lack of a structure that created much incentive as the winning MIT team's scheme, their network of participants grew to only about 1,400 people.
These members included students, faculty, and alumni on official mailing lists and social media website groups for organizations on the team (e.g., Pennsylvania State University).
This technology worked slowly and would have benefited from a longer contest duration, but the Twitter crawler proved to be especially useful because tweets sometimes contained geographic information.
The iSchools team used a variety of information sources, including social networks, to determine what the real location was.
[10] His plan was to create a web site and Twitter account dedicated to the challenge that would allow his team members to communicate their findings.
They also utilized 3,000 Nerdfighters who scanned for Internet traffic related to the competition and specialized in launching a misinformation campaign, hoping to confuse or misdirect other teams.
They also created a network of cell phone users to provide direct text message verification of findings.
[4] A team of iPhone application developers formed Army of Eyes, based out of Austin, TX.
[4] The iNeighbors team, made up of members of an existing social media site for neighborhood watch communities, performed no recruitment or trading efforts.
Fourth, the challenge showed the general effectiveness of using crowdsourcing techniques to solve geographically-distributed, time-sensitive problems.
[3] DARPA noted that though social networks can be a powerful source of intelligence, using them may be politically sensitive due to the privacy concerns involved with data mining user content.
Similarly, the winning MIT team surmised that their recursive approach would only be effective if the effort's goal was seen to be moral and good by its participants.
[14] The winning team used a computer-vision algorithm to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification.
[16] In January 2012, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine launched the MyHeartMap Challenge to map Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) in the city of Philadelphia.
[19] Tag Challenge sought to have teams locate and obtain pictures of five individuals in five different cities across North America and Europe within twelve hours on March 31, 2012.
