The 2009 DARPA Network Challenge was a prize competition for exploring the roles the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
and
social networking
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...
play in the real-time communications, wide-area
collaboration
Collaboration (from Latin ''com-'' "with" + ''laborare'' "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. Most ...
s, and practical actions required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The competition was sponsored by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Adv ...
(DARPA), a research organization of the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
Department of Defense Department of Defence or Department of Defense may refer to:
Current departments of defence
* Department of Defence (Australia)
* Department of National Defence (Canada)
* Department of Defence (Ireland)
* Department of National Defense (Philipp ...
. The challenge was designed to help the military generate ideas for operating under a range of circumstances, such as natural disasters.
Congress
A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of a ...
authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their use for national security.
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. Teams often had to deal with false submissions, and so they needed to come up with ways to validate and confirm reported sightings. 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
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...
in general.
Specifics of the competition
Under the rules of the competition, the $40,000 challenge award would be granted to the first team to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red weather balloons at 10 previously undisclosed fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons were to be placed in readily accessible locations visible from nearby roads, each staffed by a DARPA agent who would issue a certificate validating each balloon location.
The balloons were deployed at 10:00 AM Eastern Time on December 5, 2009, and scheduled to be taken down at 5:00 PM. DARPA was prepared to deploy them for a second day and wait for up to a week for a team to find all of the balloons.
Part of the purpose of the challenge was to force participants to discern actual pertinent information from potential noise. Many teams came across false reports of sightings, both accidental and purposeful. One valid strategy was spamming social networks with false reports to throw competitors off the trail of real sightings. The verification of balloon sightings was paramount to success.
The contest was announced only about a month before the start date. This limited the amount of time teams had to prepare. The ability of many to do so showed the effectiveness of mass and social media to distribute information and organize people quickly.
The time in which information about the challenge spread was actually more compressed than a month. However, in the week preceding the launch day the official competition site increased in traffic from an average of 1,000 hits per day to 20,000 hits per day. Similarly, the efforts of many competing teams went viral in the last few days before the start date.
DARPA selected the date of the competition to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
.
Results
Even though DARPA was prepared to deploy the balloons for a second day and accept submissions for up to a week until a team found all 10 balloons, the
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
Red Balloon Challenge Team won the competition in under 9 hours.
A team from the
Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), which located nine balloons, won second place. Two other teams found eight balloons, five found seven, and the iSchools team (which represented
Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...
,
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...
,
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...
,
Syracuse University
Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...
, and
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...
), whose strategy is described below, finished tenth with six balloons.
In table form, the top ten teams were:
Winning strategy
The winning MIT team used a technique similar to
multi-level marketing
Multi-level marketing (MLM), also called network marketing or pyramid selling, is a controversial marketing strategy for the sale of products or services in which the revenue of the MLM company is derived from a non-salaried workforce selling th ...
to recruit participants, with the prize money to be distributed up the chain of participants leading to successful balloon spottings, and all prize income remaining after distribution to participants to be given to charity. The team's strategy for public collaboration in finding the balloons was explained on their website:
The strategy was a variant of the Query Incentive Network model of Kleinberg and Raghavan,
with the main difference being that the incentive rewards in the team's technique scale down for later participants.
The recursive nature of the reward had two beneficial effects. First, participants had an incentive to involve others, as these new people would not become competitors for the reward but rather cooperating partners. Second, people not located in the United States were motivated to participate by passing along information even though they had no way of locating a balloon in person. This helped the team garner a large number (over 5,000) of participants.
The team only began with four initial participants.
To determine whether submissions were legitimate or fake, the team employed at least three strategies. The first strategy was examining whether there were multiple submissions for a location. If this was the case, then the likelihood of a balloon actually being there was thought to be higher. A second strategy was to check whether the IP address of the submitter matched the supposed location of the balloon. A third strategy was to examine photos accompanying the submission. Real photos included a DARPA employee and a DARPA banner, details which were not announced, while faked ones did not.
A detailed analysis of the winning strategy highlighted the important role that social media played. Analysis of Twitter data showed that while some teams relied on large initial bursts of activity over Twitter, mentions of those teams quickly faded. It was argued that due to the recursive incentive structure, the MIT team was able to create a more sustained social media impact than most teams.
Second-place strategy
The second-place GTRI team used a strategy that relied heavily on Internet publicity and social media. They created a Web site three weeks before the launch day and used a variety of media-related efforts, including a
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
group, in order to increase the visibility of the team and increase the chance that people who spotted the balloons would report the sightings to them.
The team promised to donate all winnings to charity to appeal to the altruism of participants. 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.
With regards to validating submissions, the team assumed that because of the charitable nature of their effort, the number of false submissions would be low. In any case, they primarily relied on personal validation, having phone conversations with submitters.
Tenth-place strategy
The tenth-place iSchools team, which represented five universities, tried two distinct approaches. The first was directly recruiting team members to look for the balloons on launch day. 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
The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...
). Only a few of these observers actually participated, however, and only one balloon was found using this strategy.
The second strategy was using
open-source intelligence
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of data gathered from open sources (covert and publicly available sources) to produce actionable intelligence. OSINT is primarily used in national security, law enforcement, and busi ...
methods to do cyberspace searching for results related to the challenge. This was the main source of their success in locating balloons. This strategy, in turn, consisted of two distinct sub-strategies. The first was to use a group of human analysts who would manually search online on a variety of information sources, including
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
and the websites of competing teams, compile reported sightings, and then evaluate the validity of sightings based on the reputation of the sources.
Another strategy relating to cyberspace searching that the team used was an automated
Web crawler
A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...
which captured data from Twitter and opposing teams' websites and then analyzed it. 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.
To confirm the validity of possible sightings, recruited team members were used when possible. If none were available, new observers were recruited from organizations located near the sighting. The distributed location of the different organizations in the team allowed this to be a feasible strategy. Photographic analysis was used to confirm or dispute the validity of claims.
The team also encountered a case of another team accidentally leaking information about a sighting and then trying to cover it up. The iSchools team used a variety of information sources, including social networks, to determine what the real location was. This demonstrated the possibility of using information from a wide variety of public websites to determine the validity of something.
Other strategies
Prior to the competition numerous people had discussed possible strategies, including
satellite photography
Satellite images (also Earth observation imagery, spaceborne photography, or simply satellite photo) are images of Earth collected by imaging satellites operated by governments and businesses around the world. Satellite imaging companies sell im ...
,
aerial photography
Aerial photography (or airborne imagery) is the taking of photographs from an aircraft or other airborne platforms. When taking motion pictures, it is also known as aerial videography.
Platforms for aerial photography include fixed-wing aircra ...
and
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...
to detect balloons, as well as the possibility of
misinformation
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. It differs from disinformation, which is ''deliberately'' deceptive. Rumors are information not attributed to any particular source, and so are unreliable and often unverified, but can turn ou ...
campaigns to stop other teams from winning. In the actual competition, there was a variety of strategies employed by teams.
One team leader, Jason Brindel of
San Rafael, California
San Rafael ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Raphael (archangel), St. Raphael", ) is a city and the county seat of Marin County, California, Marin County, California, United States. The city is located in the North Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), ...
, organized a team of around 140 people.
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. Anyone participating in the challenge would be allowed to submit information, provided that they included details confirming about their submission. Brindel planned to have the team scour the Internet for mentions of balloons across news sites, blogs, and social media sites.
George Hotz
George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), alias geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur, and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit br ...
, a Twitter celebrity now famous for hacking the
PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...
and settling a suit by
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
, only prepared for the competition for an hour before posting a tweet an hour before the start of the competition. Hotz was able to locate 8 balloons successfully. Four were found within his Twitter network of almost 50,000 followers, and four were acquired through trades of information with other teams.
The fifth-place finisher, the
Groundspeak Geocachers, deployed active geocachers and Groundspeak employees to search for balloons. They were successful in finding eight balloons, but due to a data entry error, were only credited with seven.
A team calling themselves
Nerdfighters utilized their existing network of followers from the
Brotherhood 2.0 vlog
A video blog or video log, sometimes shortened to vlog (), is a form of blog for which the medium is video. Vlog entries often combine embedded video (or a video link) with supporting text, images, and other metadata. Entries can be recorded in ...
to launch a viral video before the competition. They managed to attract 2,000 active balloon seekers. 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.
A team of
iPhone application developers formed Army of Eyes, based out of
Austin, TX
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...
. Their application was developed soon after the original challenge announcement in order to be made available by challenge launch day.
The team, made up of members of an existing social media site for neighborhood watch communities, performed no recruitment or trading efforts. Their goal was to evaluate the ability of their network to effectively report on abnormal activity within neighborhoods. They were able to successfully locate five of the ten balloons.
Reflections
The challenge generated a number of insights.
First, it showed how mass and social media can act complementarily. While mass media were useful primarily for spreading general information about the challenge, social media were effective for viral dissemination of information about the challenge to potential team recruits.
Second, it showed how social media can be useful as a data mining source. For example, the iSchools team did better than many other teams by simply monitoring public websites.
Third, the challenge showed the variety of ways in which social networking can be utilized. The MIT and GTRI teams used them primarily to facilitate fast communication between participants, while the iSchools team used it as a source of information.
Fourth, the challenge showed the general effectiveness of using
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...
techniques to solve geographically-distributed, time-sensitive problems. The DARPA program managers were surprised by how quickly the challenge was completed. However, it can be difficult to filter useful data from public sites, and the independent verification of publicly listed information remains a challenge in efficiency and accuracy.
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.
Verified balloon locations
The officially verified coordinates of the balloons, listed by their tag numbers, were:
Balloon 1 Union Square
Union commonly refers to:
* Trade union, an organization of workers
* Union (set theory), in mathematics, a fundamental operation on sets
Union may also refer to:
Arts and entertainment
Music
* Union (band), an American rock group
** ''Un ...
,
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, California
* Balloon 2:
Chaparral Park,
Scottsdale, Arizona
* Balloon 3:
Tonsler Park,
Charlottesville
Charlottesville, colloquially known as C'ville, is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is the county seat of Albemarle County, which surrounds the city, though the two are separate legal entities. It is named after Queen Cha ...
, Virginia
* Balloon 4:
Chase Palm Park,
Santa Barbara, California
* Balloon 5:
Tom Lee Park
Tom Lee Park is a city park located to the immediate west of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, overlooking the Mississippi River. Encompassing about parallel to the Mississippi River for about , it offers panoramic views of the Mississippi River and ...
,
Memphis
Memphis most commonly refers to:
* Memphis, Egypt, a former capital of ancient Egypt
* Memphis, Tennessee, a major American city
Memphis may also refer to:
Places United States
* Memphis, Alabama
* Memphis, Florida
* Memphis, Indiana
* Memp ...
, Tennessee
* Balloon 6:
Collins Avenue
Collins Avenue, partly co-signed State Road A1A, is a major thoroughfare in South Florida, United States. The road runs parallel to the Atlantic Ocean in Miami Beach, Florida, one block west. It also runs through the cities of Surfside and S ...
,
Miami
Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a East Coast of the United States, coastal metropolis and the County seat, county seat of Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade C ...
, Florida
* Balloon 7:
Glasgow Park,
Christiana, Delaware
* Balloon 8:
Katy Park
Katy Park was a baseball park located in Waco, Texas and was used by many minor league baseball teams as well as the Baylor Bears baseball, Baylor Bears for a short time.
Significant Moments
* The New York Yankees played an exhibition game again ...
,
Katy, Texas
* Balloon 9:
Waterfront Park,
Portland
Portland most commonly refers to:
* Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States
* Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...
, Oregon
* Balloon 10:
Centennial Park,
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
, Georgia
Related challenges
Inspired by the success of the DARPA Network Challenge, DARPA launched the
Shredder Challenge in 2011. This competition aimed to explore methods to reconstruct documents shredded by a variety of paper shredding techniques. As with the DARPA Network Challenge, some teams used crowdsourcing to solicit human help in reconstructing the documents. The winning team used a computer-vision algorithm to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification.
On July 2, 2011, also inspired by the DARPA Network Challenge, the
Langley Knights Challenge was launched. It differed in that there were knights to find in various locations in England and that had been placed on
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
so people in locations outside the UK could participate.
In January 2012, the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
School of Medicine launched the
MyHeartMap Challenge to map
Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) in the city of
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
. According to the organizer Dr. Raina Merchant, "DARPA succeeded with locating red balloons. AEDs are a natural extension of a brilliant idea."
Also inspired by the DARPA Network Challenge, a contest called
Tag Challenge The Tag Challenge is a social gaming competition, with a US$5,000 reward, in which participants were invited to find five "suspects" in a simulated law enforcement search in five different cities throughout North America and Europe on March 31, 201 ...
was sponsored by the
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other n ...
and the
Institute of International Education
The Institute of International Education (IIE) is a 501(c) organization which focuses on international student exchange and aid, foreign affairs, and international peace and security. IIE creates programs of study and training for students, educa ...
.
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. Despite the fact that the potential winnings were considerably lower than for the DARPA Network Challenge, organizers sought to test the ability of the methods discovered in that challenge to "find a person of interest" rather than a statically located object.
See also
*
List of computer science awards
This list of computer science awards is an index to articles on notable awards related to computer science. It includes lists of awards by the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, other comput ...
References
External links
*
{{DARPA, state=collapsed
Science competitions
Crowdsourcing
Computer science competitions
Challenge awards
2009 in the United States
Balloons (entertainment)