“An MIT team’s savvy use of social media to locate weather balloons as part of a $40,000 DARPA contest may shed light on how to mobilize resources during emergencies.
On Tuesday, Dec. 1, members of the MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Laboratory received an e-mail with a $40,000 proposition. The U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was holding a competition that weekend: on Saturday morning, 10 large red weather balloons would be raised at undisclosed locations across the United States; the first team to use social media — like online social networks and communication systems — to determine the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 would receive $40,000.
On Wednesday, members of the lab began discussing possible approaches to the problem. By Thursday, they had built a demonstration version of the website they would use to aggregate data, and on Thursday evening the site went live. Within two days, 5,000 people had formally joined the team’s network, out of hundreds of thousands who had visited the site. On Saturday morning the balloons went up, and by the end of the day the MIT team — which consisted of postdocs Riley Crane and Manuel Cebrian and grad students Galen Pickard, Anmol Madan, and Wei Pan — had won the competition.
The crux of the MIT team’s approach was the incentive structure it designed — a way of splitting up the prize money among people who helped find a balloon. Whoever provided the balloon’s correct coordinates got $2,000; but whoever invited that person to join the network got $1,000; whoever invited that person got $500; and so on. No matter how long the chain got, the total payment would never quite reach $4,000; whatever was left over went to charity.”
Read more at MIT News
DARPA is still around, eh?
So they worked for months on it but the proposal did not come into till the very last moment .. hm ..
Seems not easy anyhow, but not undoable.
I love red balloons. :-p