Reflecting on the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge

Abstract

Finding 10 balloons across the U.S. illustrates how the Internet has changed the way we solve highly distributed problems.

Adopting incentive mechanisms for large-scale participation in mobile crowdsensing: from literature review to a conceptual framework

“…In designing incentive mechanisms to reward the actual effort of participants, consideration is sometimes given to the work done in introducing or recruiting new users into the crowdsensing system [65]. The adoption of this type of incentive mechanism by the winning team of the 2009 DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, i.e., the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, clearly demonstrates its effectiveness [66]. Such reward mechanisms, often known as geometric incentive schemes, compensate users with additional passive incentive or a proportion of the rewards earned by participants they introduced/recruited to the crowdsensing system and those of every other participant that has joined under that referral tree [65].…”

“…In this approach, different redeemable credit points are assigned to various locations and users motivated by these incentives can choose to make it to the locations of interest to capture data samples [93]. While the aforementioned solutions have made significant research contributions, further studies are required to address the problem of poor area coverage along various directions, such as the use of mobility profiles as one of the selection criteria when recruiting participants [65]; recruiting participants with high demographic diversity [66]; increasing the coverage area by understanding the mobility patterns of different groups [67]; involving participants with broad and diverse social interaction patterns [68]; and the use of density maps to estimate the number of participants in a given area [25]. It is also important to investigate the problem of poor area coverage from the perspective of unequal representation of various community stakeholders and interest groups in the participatory sensing process and how that influences the fairness and reliability of the crowdsensed data for urban decision making.…”

The Whodunit Challenge: Mobilizing the Crowd in India

“…By asking teams to find ten red balloons that were hidden across the United States, the challenge aimed to exp lore the power o f the Internet and social networks in mob ilizing large groups to solve difficu lt, t ime-crit ical problems [5]. The winning team, fro m MIT, located all of the balloons within nine hours [19] using a recursive incentive mechanis m that rewarded people for reporting balloons and for recruiting others to look for balloons [6]. Th is approach was inspired by the work of Dodds et al [20], wh ich emphasizes the importance of individual f inancial incentives [21].…”

Public Domain Treaty Compliance Verification in the Digital Age

“…The Red Balloon Challenge that DARPA conducted in 2009 arguably showed [10] as much about human behavior and incentives as it did about technology. The winning teams devised strategies that successfully provided incentives for individual participation, and this aspect was arguably more important than their technical approach to the problem.…”