IRA FLATOW, host:
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow.
Have you seen any strange flying objects lately? Well, last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - we all know that as DARPA - DARPA released 10 red weather balloons all over the country and challenged people to locate them. Oh, there was a big prize, a big one, to the first person who found all of them: $40,000. How would you like to get that kind of money for finding 10 balloons, and how would you go about finding 10 missing balloons? They could be floating anywhere, all over the country.
Well, with a little help from your friends and their friends and their friends and friends and friends and friends. My next guest is the leader of the winning team that found the balloons. He's here to talk about his winning strategy and why DARPA, that secret government research agency, would be so interested in sponsoring the contests and the result. So, if you'd like to talk about it, give us a call: 1-800-989-8255. Riley Crane is the Society in Science postdoctoral fellow in the Human Dynamics Group at the Media Lab at MIT. As I say, he is the leader of the winning team. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
Mr. RILEY CRANE (Postdoctoral Fellow, Society in Science, Human Dynamics Group, Media Lab, MIT): Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me.
FLATOW: Wow, what a feat that - all of it in nine hours.
Mr. CRANE: Yeah. It was a very exciting weekend, I have to say.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CRANE: The whole team was together in the office up there at the Media Lab, and it was an adrenaline-filled day.
FLATOW: How do - give us your strategy. How did you do this?
Mr. CRANE: Well, I think that the key to our success was we sort of - there were a couple of points. We offered a recursive incentive, which allowed us not only to reward the people who actually found balloons, but we could also reward the people who helped us find those people. I think that was one of the main keys there. But I think we had another strategy which was that we built a system that allowed you to really do viral collaboration. And so, a couple of aspects of that were that we made it effortless for people to participate, and in addition to the monetary rewards, people could really watch their direct impact at influencing others to join.
So we had one of the students who kept bothering me, a girl named Lanthy(ph), to know how many people she signed up. And so we realized that's actually a pretty cool feature that we should build in, so people could see how big their impact was.
FLATOW: So, you virtually - you virally spread this news around through the Internet�
Mr. CRANE: Exactly.
FLATOW: �among key people.
Mr. CRANE: Exactly.
FLATOW: And then someone told someone else. And were they Twittering? Were they doing all those kinds of things?
Mr. CRANE: Well, so - we actually haven't started looking at the data, but we built in mechanisms so that people could put it out on Twitter, they could put it out on Facebook. They could simply - I mean, the sort of key to it was that when you signed up, you know, you'd go to balloon.mit.edu. Ira would sign up, and you'd get a link that was balloon.mit.edu/Ira. Now, it was in your interest to promote that link as much as possible because anybody who found our site and signed up using your link, they were directly related to you as your child. And so if any of those people that you started in a chain were able to find a balloon, then you would be compensated for helping us find them.
FLATOW: And so, you spread the wealth out, too.
Mr. CRANE: Exactly.
FLATOW: How much did everybody get at the end of the day here?
Mr. CRANE: Well, so, for the sake of complete transparency, we actually haven't started looking at the results yet because we wanted to bring in the auditing office at MIT to ensure that the database was handled in the proper way. And so those folks are hard at work, and we've had a lot of administrative support. And we hope to know as soon as possible. I know everyone's holding their breath to see if they won. And I can tell you, the results are forthcoming.
FLATOW: And there was no little boy in any of those balloons?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CRANE: Nope.
FLATOW: No.
(Soundbite of laughter)
FLATOW: That didn't help. You would have gotten a lot of people looking at that point, right?
Mr. CRANE: Exactly.
(Soundbite of laughter)
FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255. I'm fascinated to know why DARPA would sponsor an event like this.
Mr. CRANE: Well, we spoke to them, and sort of the challenge that they put out was, you know, it was the 40th anniversary of the Internet, which DARPA was fundamental in helping to create. And in these 40 years, a lot has happened. We've seen the Web grow up, and very recently there has been a social layer that's being added to that Web. And a lot of people have been kind of sitting around thinking, well, I like Facebook, I like Twitter, but what are the actually good for? What can you actually do with them?
And so I think that they were interested in understanding how could you - how could social networking play a role in sort of timely communication and wider area team building and urgent mobilization that's required to solve a lot of time-critical, broad-scoped problems that are facing society?
FLATOW: You mean like terrorism.
Mr. CRANE: Well, actually, that's an interesting point. It seems that's not what this tool might be most useful for. It looks like this is more a tool that's useful when you can really rally everyone for the better good. So, things like finding missing children or, you know, imagine that a building collapses during a natural disaster and you need to rapidly find 10 people who can operate heavy machinery in a certain location. I think these are a lot of the challenges that are facing society that nobody really knows yet how to mobilize people on a large scale, and I think that's what our team was able to demonstrate, that these things are possible and that we've built the technology to try to do it. And it was a lot of fun.
FLATOW: Well, it's fun. But what is fascinating also is that you, who built the technology and built the infrastructure, don't yet know how it worked.
Mr. CRANE: Yeah, well, that's - there are a couple of reasons for that, actually, mostly, that this competition started as sort of a group of guys who wanted to participate in this contest. We, you know, there's a sort of funny story that - my friend Olin(ph) told me about this about four days ago - or fours days before the competition started. And so we all sort of worked day and night to get this thing done. And we're - I think that that speaks to the power of our approach, which was that - you know, I'd like to sit here and tell you that we used sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to solve the problem. But, in fact, I think the system we developed beforehand allowed us to collect the relevant information that we needed and then sort of filter through, you know, a lot of the spam and misinformation that people were spreading. And so I think it was - the team, we all did a pretty good job at doing all that.
FLATOW: Yeah. Could you use this to find a person or find anything, you think, this idea that you created?
Mr. CRANE: Well, I think that the power of this lies when you really have a sort of consensus, you know. I think the moment that, you know, you brought up terrorism and, I think that's what a lot of people are thinking about. But the moment that you have differing factions who would like to - who each have their own sort of role in, you know, in either finding or not finding a person, I think that's where the complication of misinformation and disinformation might prove very difficult to sort through.
So in terms of finding a missing child in which sort of something that everyone can really get behind in trying to participate in, I think that's definitely a critical application that we see coming out of this.
FLATOW: I see. In other words, you're saying if you were looking for Osama bin Laden or somebody like that, there would be people who would not want you to find him, so they would put disinformation into the system and upset the system.
Mr. CRANE: Exactly.
FLATOW: But because you have any innocuous sort of thing like finding 10 red balloons, then everybody's in on what's clearly seen as a real game, here.
Mr. CRANE: Sure. And I can't say everybody. We've spoken to some of the teams afterwards. For example, the Nerd Fighters team, who actively spammed our site, so we'd like to give a shout out to them, because they sort of really tried to make it difficult for us.
CONAN: Hmm.
Mr. CRANE: And they were a great competitor.
FLATOW: Nick in Royal Oak, Michigan. Hi.
NICK (Caller): Hello.
FLATOW: Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. Hi, there.
NICK: Yeah, I just want to shout out and say that we were one of the groups that tried to throw off, just a kind of add a real world environment to it. With i3 Detroit, we actually flew our own balloon, and it was number three, for i3 Detroit.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NICK: And - but we loved the idea, and we're really glad that someone actually found all the real balloons.
FLATOW: Now, so you put a fake one up to throw them off?
NICK: Yes, we did.
FLATOW: How many people you think did that, Nick? Any idea?
NICK: You know what? We tried to find a couple of sites. I want to say there were, like, around 200 false balloons, but we actually couldn't get an accurate number. We're hoping that, you know, something will be published soon.
FLATOW: Two hundred false balloons, you think?
NICK: I think, yeah.
FLATOW: Wow, what do you say to that, Riley?
Mr. CRANE: Yeah, I mean, that was really one of the interesting parts of the story, and I think that was a testament to sort of our team's strength in processing the raw data and making sense of the sort of complex patterns.
I mean, like I said, I wish we had been able to get together some sort of very sophisticated tools of network analysis, all of which I think may prove effective sort of after the fact, but I think what we relied on was sort of some very straightforward checks. And while I can't disclose all of the techniques we used because, you know, of course we're scientists, and we're interested in publishing a lot of this eventually, some very straightforward things we did to sort of verify the results were, you know: Did the participant have a valid email address? Was the balloon location that they reported consistent with the geographical location that their computer said there were at? Sort of some very straightforward things, and we were sort of, you know, hit with a lot of spam and, I think, a lot of - you know, there were Photoshopped images of balloons in Providence, and it took a lot of effort on our team's part to sort through all of that.
FLATOW: And you say that this is sort of proprietary, the math that you used on this? Or are you going to publish the whole thing and make it public?
Mr. CRANE: No, I think once - you know, as I said, this was done as a contest by some students, and now that we've sort of collected this data set, which is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have such a rich data set on questions pertaining to how information spreads in ad hoc networks and some of the core questions like, you know, how can we harness the power of social media, I think there are a lot of questions.
And so we're moving forward to make sure that we're going to be able to have access to that data.
FLATOW: Would you like to see another one of these contests?
Mr. CRANE: Absolutely. I think DARPA has done an amazing job of challenging and driving a lot of innovation with their other projects involving autonomous cars and I think now getting into some networking approaches, I think. I think what this contest demonstrated is really the power of utilizing the vast resources of the human network to solve difficult challenges facing society. I hope they do it.
FLATOW: It's sort of a triumph of open source, is it not, in a certain sense?
Mr. CRANE: In some sense. We sort of crowd-sourced the intelligence of the United States to solve this very difficult challenge, and I think it - I would love to see DARPA, not only put more funding and research for areas like this, but also to continue these types of challenges.
FLATOW: All right, Riley, thank you, very well-spoken, very well-said. Thank you very much for taking time - and congratulations.
Mr. CRANE: Thank you.
FLATOW: I hope you get some of that cash.
Mr. CRANE: Well we've - just to make that clear, we - the entire team of Gayla(ph) and Manuel(ph), Way(ph) and Anmal(ph) and Sandy(ph), we've - none of us are going to be profiting from any of this. All of the proceeds will be going to charity for the money that's not claimed, so...
FLATOW: There you go. Thank you very much.
Mr. CRANE: Thanks a lot, Ira, appreciate it.
FLATOW: And have a happy holiday season, Riley.
Mr. CRANE: You, too.
FLATOW: Riley Crane is a society and science postdoctoral fellow in the Human Dynamics Group at the Media Lab at MIT, the winner - $40,000, it comes to $4,000 a balloon, 10 balloons.
We're going to switch gears, come right back. Stay with us - after this break.
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FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.
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