Crowdsourcing localization

The Darpa Network Challenge is an interesting idea, using social networks to localize objects (in that case: harmless balloons, but it is easy to imagine other usages…) spread all across a (rich and connected) country. It took nine hours to an MIT team to find all nine balloons, using the promise to share the money of the price as a bait for social network information:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers took less than nine hours to find 10 weather balloons that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had placed randomly in public places around the United States, claiming the $40,000 contest prize. About 4,300 teams participated in DARPA’s Network Challenge over the weekend. The Pentagon will study the results to better understand how social networking can solve large-scale problems that require fast solutions.

DARPA placed the 8-foot, red balloons, all marked with numbered pennants and most with a DARPA banner, in public parks and other locations, from Miami’s South Beach and San Francisco’s Union Square to a tennis court in Charlottesville, Va.Teams used various methods to identify balloon locations, from synthesizing public information to collaborating in large groups. Some tried to confuse challenge participants with false locations, including a large paper copy of a balloon in Providence, R.I.

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