Article in ‘Science’ Journal Analyzes MIT Team’s Win at DARPA Network Challenge that Measured Crowd-Sourcing Power of Social Media Platforms

Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, an independent, research-driven graduate-level university focused on advanced energy and sustainable technologies, announced the prestigious ‘Science’ journal has published for the first time a paper co-authored by a UAE-based scientist.

The paper analyses the tactics adopted by various teams during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Network Challenge, which measured the crowd-sourcing power of today’s social media platforms. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) Red Balloon Challenge Team was declared the winner.

As a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Human Dynamics research laboratory of Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Assistant Professor – Computing and Information Science, Masdar Institute, had the opportunity to help the MIT team decipher the data generated from the DARPA Network Challenge, and build mathematical models to analyze the incentive mechanism and its main features.

The first of its kind, DARPA Network Challenge was launched to mark the 40th anniversary of the birth of the Internet, and to test how it has changed the way human beings can mobilize social networks. DARPA is the government agency that developed many of the technologies that has become integral to the Internet.

Nearly 4,300 teams participated in the DARPA Network Challenge that involved locating ten weather balloons placed randomly across Continental US. Using a ‘recursive incentive mechanism’ that both spread information about the task and incentivized individuals to act, the team was able to find all ten balloons, marked with numbered pennants, in less than nine hours, and won the Challenge.

The Science journal article analyzes the theoretical and practical properties of this mechanism and its analogy with other approaches. The authors of the article have attempted to quantify the effect of the ‘recursive incentive mechanism’ strategy, by analyzing the set of all Tweets published by people on social networking site Twitter. The number of Tweets that mention the different top performing teams were also measured.

Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute, said: “Time-critical social mobilization aims to organize social networks in order to find valuable information especially during emergency scenarios such as earth quakes or the outbreak of an epidemic like bird flu. In these situations, people need to act swiftly and in a coordinated manner to find crucial information. After an earthquake, it is absolutely crucial to quickly locate an engineer who knows the whereabouts of power generators, while during an epidemic it is highly essential to rapidly identify people who showed early symptoms for treatment and quarantine.”

The joint collaboration on this article represents an ongoing cooperation between M.I.T. and Masdar Institute on the use of social networks for promoting sustainability. A recently funded project titled ‘Internet-Mediated Social Mobilization for Promoting Sustainable Behavior’, aims to investigate incentive mechanisms for mobilizing social networks towards promoting the adoption of sustainable technologies and behaviors. The project will develop novel incentive mechanisms that enable an interested party to promote a sustainable technology or behavior through a social network. The approach has numerous potential applications in sustainability and energy conservation, such as encouraging the adoption of energy-efficient technologies, or promoting greener means of transportation.

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