Cutting Edge

Balloon 10 was located at Centennial Park in Atlanta. Or, more precisely, N 33° 45' 33" W 84° 23' 33"

(Credit: DARPA)

MIT's Riley Crane only found out about DARPA's red balloon challenge a few days before it started. Yet his team went on to win the contest through its savvy use of the Internet.

The challenge posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked people to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons floating above the U.S. in one day. Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10, participants had to figure out how to work with others to solve the puzzle.

Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed to attract more and more followers--people who might know the balloons' locations themselves and those could bring aboard others who knew the coordinates, essentially creating a chain effect.

The five-member MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team consisted of group leader Crane and Manuel Cebrian, both post-doctoral research fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rounding off the team were three students--Galen Pickard, Wei Pan, and Anmol Madan.

Crane holds a Ph.D in physics, while Cebrian has his in computer science. Both Pickard and Madan are Ph.D candidates, and Pan is preparing for his MS degree. As researchers in the Human Dynamics Group at MIT's Media Lab, the five study the science of how people interact with technology.

On Monday I spoke with Crane to discuss his thoughts on entering and winning DARPA's offbeat challenge.

First, congratulations on winning the challenge. Second, can you tell me how you entered the contest and what methods or strategies you used to find the positions of the balloons?
Crane: Sure, I think the key factor as to why our team ended up able to pull this off--I mean, we had some great competitors that we only learned about after the fact--is that we really designed a system that allowed people to [see it] as sort of a recursive incentive. So on the surface, I think some people see it as sort of a pyramid scheme, when in fact, it's exactly the opposite. I can illustrate it with an example of a friend of mine in Europe who wrote back and said "There's no reason I should join because I'm in Europe. I'm not going to find one of the balloons." And that's exactly the point. We designed this sort of recursive incentive. Of course, he's not going to find the balloons. But he might know someone in the U.S., and that person may find a balloon. And so if he can put us in contact with that person, then he should get some type of a reward as well.

So the system we built is as simple as that. If you heard about our Web site and went to sign up directly, and you found a balloon, you would get $2,000, and $2,000 would go to charity. If instead you signed up and then you told your friends, and one of your friends found a balloon, that person would still get $2,000 because they found the balloon. And you, because you signed someone up who found the balloon, would also be rewarded with $1,000, and then $1,000 would go to charity.

We think this recursive incentive allowed people to feel as though they were a part of a team helping to solve this proverbial needle in the haystack challenge. And they could participate in a meaningful way, even if they really had no chance of finding a balloon themselves. We had a lot of feedback of "We won." And people really felt they were a part of the team because of this.

One of the interesting things is that in trying to understand what we actually did, a lot of people might think of viral marketing. But again, this is the wrong point because it's not that our approach was to get a message out. It was more that we wanted people to send information back to us. You could really see a fun way of engaging people that they can see how influential and how resourceful they could be at getting people to join this challenge and recruiting them for the greater good.

So it was kind of a snowball effect?
Crane: Absolutely. The key is to try to make this as self-propagating as possible so that we can really get as many people engaged.

Riley, do you have a sense of how many people were engaged through your site?
Crane: The shocking thing on our side is that I actually only found out about the challenge four days ago. A friend of mine sent me a link and said, "Oh, I guess you must have a team over there at MIT." And we were kind of joking around within our group and very quickly hit upon this idea. In two days, I built a site and got it running. And then we only officially launched the site on Thursday evening. We sent out five e-mails because there are five members of the team. And within 48 hours, we had gone up to 5,000 [e-mails]. And we had something on the order of a few hundred thousand page views of people who may not have signed up but came and took a look. So it was an incredible bootstrapping approach that really got us up to speed.

Do you have a sense of what tools or sites other people used to spread the word? Did they use traditional social-networking sites like Facebook or Twitter or other resources?
Crane: I'm not entirely sure, but I do know of a few other competitors, one of which used an iPhone application. I think there was another one, a videologger, who had a few hundred thousand followers and a pool of thousands of people that they could call and ask them to verify [the locations of the balloons].

How were you were able to verify the responses from people who sent you the coordinates of the balloons?
Crane: That's the only thing we can't discuss at this point. I can tell you that we received a lot of spam and had indirect, private communications with one of the other teams who was happy they had been so successful at spamming us. We received a lot of Photoshopped images of balloons in different places in the U.S. It was a very exciting Saturday for us in our lab up here in the Human Dynamics group. But as for the actual way we did it, we'll discuss in a forthcoming release.

As far as the prize money, it sounded like whatever amount goes to a single individual, that same amount would also go to charity?
Crane: Not the same amount. Each balloon had a value of $4,000. If you came directly to us without a referral, you got $2,000, and the charity got $2,000. If you came with one referral, if one person referred you to us, then you still got your $2,000, the referrer gets $1,000 and the charity gets $1,000. This goes on from $2,000, $1,000, $500, $250, $125, and so on. This goes on down the chain. It essentially gets to the point where you would be splitting pennies if the chain were extremely long.

So if you took the $40,000 cash money, can you extrapolate how much would go to participants and how much would go to charity?
Crane: We would be able to, but at this point we haven't looked at the data. We're trying to be as transparent as possible. So we've actually asked the MIT auditing department within the greater Massachusetts Institute of Technology to verify our results and make it official so that there's complete transparency in how the process is handled.

Do you know yet which charity would be the recipient of any of the funds?
Crane: No. That will be announced at some point, how that would be done. But at this point, we have no comment on that.

And if I could add, from our point of view, what the message of this was. I think it's important to point out that there's a tremendous scientific opportunity in all of this, and from our side, we were never in it for the 10 balloons. Of course, that was the challenge, and that was exciting. But from a broader scientific perspective, we were in it to understand how to mobilize the vast resources of the human network, to face challenges and explore opportunities in living in such a connected society. And as a footnote to that, I think some of the applications that might come out of this would be: Can we use this technology we've developed to find missing children or something along those lines where there's an incentive for people to really participate and help out? Often, the police will offer a reward for finding a missing child. Can we restructure that in a way that we tap the vast resources of this network? Again, maybe you don't live in the state where a child was abducted, but maybe you know someone who does. Or during an emergency, maybe we need to find 10 people in a region who can operate heavy machinery, maybe a building collapsed. And how can we use these new tools to solve those challenges to help society? That's kind of the broader message that comes out of this from our side.

I know DARPA seemed to go into the challenge with the same point of view. Their goal was not to have the positions of the balloons uncovered. Their ultimate goal was to gauge how the Internet and social networking could be used and harnessed for more widespread issues and problems and puzzles.
Crane: Yeah, I think there's a subtlety in there. I think it actually only works because there's a benevolent or greater good. You know, somebody had asked us if they thought we could use this to do something bad. And I think it really wouldn't work. The incentives were designed specifically so that people feel good about the fact that they're participating, that maybe if they don't solve it, that somehow they're helping charity or helping science in the greater good.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won $40,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for correctly finding the locations of 10 red balloons scattered across the U.S.

(Credit: DARPA)

Launched on Saturday, the DARPA Network Challenge released the 10 red balloons into the air, then dared contestants to find their latitude and longitude by the end of the day. Since no one person could track down all 10 in just one day, the point of the contest was to see how participants would use the Internet and social networking to team up with others to solve the quest.

DARPA said that more than 4,300 contestants registered for the challenge, of which 218 actually submitted answers. MIT was the first and only one to get all 10 answers right, finishing the contest in just under nine hours, though a few teams got at least eight correct.

Prior to winning the contest, Team MIT explained its strategy at its DARPA challenge Web site. Interested parties could register to submit the coordinates of any balloons they spotted. All people who signed up would be given their own individual Web pages, which they could publicize using Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. A snowball effect would entice more people to join the effort. And apparently...that strategy paid off.

One contestant who managed to pinpoint eight of the 10 balloons called himself 10redballons. This person also reported that as the day progressed, most teams managed to find at least five of the balloons and had started to publish the coordinates on the Web. He also said many teams were scrambling for clues to uncover the last two balloons.

DARPA enjoys a reputation for launching offbeat research projects that it hopes will provide useful information.

"The Challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue, and, we hope, is part of a growing 'renaissance of wonder' throughout the nation," said DARPA's director Regina E. Dugan in a statement. "DARPA salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than 9 hours after balloon launch."

DARPA kicked off the Network Challenge, marking the 40th anniversary of the Internet, to see how social networking could be used to tackle broad problems and issues. The agency said it plans to meet with MIT and other contestants to learn what strategies they used to track down the locations of the balloons.

MIT's concept robot head mounts on the dashboard to assist with navigation.

(Credit: MIT)

MIT intends to revolutionize GPS navigation by making it friendly and predictive, using a friendly robot helper to anticipate your needs. The Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) is a robot head on an articulated neck, reminiscent of movie robots from the 1980s, that mounts in the center of the dashboard.

It incorporates an expressive "face" that can smile, look sad, show warning signs, and even wink at you. AIDA was developed as a collaboration between the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, MIT's SENSEable City Lab, and Volkswagen Group of America's Electronics Research Lab.

AIDA's expressive behaviors are designed to endear the device to you as it helps in your daily navigation. The robot learns your daily commute and which areas you frequent for which purposes.

For example, if you always head to a particular district in your city around dinner time, it will assume you like to eat dinner there. After it memorizes your commute, it will automatically plug in your route to work when you get into the car on a weekday morning. If you go to a hotel for a dalliance every Thursday at noon, it will probably give you a wink and a knowing grin as it maps the route for you.

MIT's prototype retinal implant consists of a flexible substrate, power and data receiving coils, an electrode array, and a stimulator microchip.

(Credit: Shawn Kelly/MIT)

Electronic retinal implants that can help certain visually impaired people see better are getting closer to reality with a new MIT prototype (PDF).

Engineered eyes a la Blade Runner remain a long way off. But by replacing the function of retinal cells, the implants could help provide a degree of basic vision to those afflicted with retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, major causes of blindness.

Users would wear special glasses fitted with a small camera that relays image data to a titanium-encased chip mounted on the outside surface of the eyeball. The chip would then fire an electrode array under the retina to stimulate the optic nerve. The glasses would also wirelessly transmit power to coils surrounding the eyeball.

In this illustration, the glasses transmit data and power to the prosthesis.

(Credit: Boston Retinal Implant Project)

MIT has been working on retinal implants for 20 years as part of the Boston Retinal Implant Project. About 10 years ago, researchers tested the electrodes on six blind patients, who reported seeing cloud-like images when stimulated.

MIT scientists led by John Wyatt, an electrical engineering professor, want to test their new prototype on patients within three years.

The implants have been successfully placed in pigs for as long as 10 months without damage to the electronics, according to MIT.

About 20 teams worldwide are working to realize the dream of eye implants that could work as well as cochlear implants for the hearing-impaired. But the delicate structures of the eye, as well as engineering challenges, have made for slow progress.

"To create a bionic eye is equivalent to trying to create a television as compared with a radio," Nigel Lovell, a professor at the University of New South Wales collaborating with Australian groups to create a bionic eye, says in this video. "It's orders of magnitude more complex."

One issue researchers must tackle is where to place the electrodes. The Australian group would place them on top of the retina, while MIT's approach is to place them beneath the retina. MIT says that reduces the risk of retinal tearing and requires less invasive surgery.

What might early bionic vision look like? Very low-res. ... Read more

(Credit: MIT)

On the heels of a scientific report last month saying 63 percent of world fish stocks require rebuilding, scientists at MIT have unveiled a new robot fish that's cheap to make and ripe for mass production.

Actually, MIT engineers Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia Y Alvarado aren't aiming to replenish fisheries. They want their robot swimmers to be used for underwater monitoring of pipelines, sunken ships, and pollution. Since the fish are less than a foot long, they can maneuver into spaces that are too tight for most underwater autonomous vehicles (UAVs).

The fish--while not as pretty as these toxin-sniffing robot carp patrolling Spanish waters--are notable for their novel design. They have fewer than 10 parts, making them low-cost, and are housed in a continuous flexible polymer casing that prevents water damage.

Lacking different segments, the fish can swim more naturally, according to MIT (watch the video after the jump). A single motor in the middle initiates a wave that moves along the body and propels it forward. Real fish move in a similar fashion by contracting muscles on either side of their bodies.

Youcef-Toumi noted that the polymers allow for stiffness to be specified in different sections, adding that another application would be robotic prosthetic limbs.

The early versions of the fish, about 5 inches long, swam like bass and trout, with movement concentrated in the tail. ... Read more

This quadrocopter can find its way around interiors.

(Credit: Ascending Technologies)

Just when you were getting used to the idea of unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling the skies over your city, they're beginning to enter buildings.

This flying robot designed by a U.S.-German team recently won a contest in which the goal was to autonomously navigate inside a simulated nuclear power plant and find and image a control panel without the aid of a GPS.

The Pelican, based on hardware designed by German start-up Ascending Technologies with programming by a team at MIT, accomplished the mission on its fourth attempt, but with only a few minutes to spare. It netted a $10,000 prize at the International Aerial Robotics Competition.

The Pelican is a micro air vehicle (MAV) with a quadrotor design, using four propellers on a carbon-fiber frame for lift and control. It maps hallways and rooms with a 32-yard-range laser scanner and stereo cameras while wirelessly reporting its progress to offboard computers. The location and mapping algorithm was implemented by the MIT team.

Entering its 20th year, the small but venerable IARC proposes challenges that cannot be met with current technology, military or otherwise. In its next mission, the sixth, MAVs will have to penetrate a simulated security compound, steal a flash drive and replace it with a dud before exiting safely and undetected.

It's a good thing MAVs still sound like a thousand mosquitoes due to rotor noise. Otherwise they might start putting spies out of business.

It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your trash is? A new project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hopes to find out.

A team of MIT researchers announced on Wednesday a project called Trash Track, designed to monitor trash from start to finish. The team will electronically tag different pieces of waste to trace their voyage through the disposal systems of New York City and Seattle.

By examining the patterns and costs of waste disposal, MIT hopes to educate people about the impact of garbage on the environment and make them aware of what they throw out.

Prototype of the trash tag

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

"Trash is one of today's most pressing issues--both directly and as a reflection of our attitudes and behaviors," says professor Carlo Ratti, head of the MIT Senseable City Lab. "Our project aims to reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today's recycling and sanitation systems. The project could be considered the urban equivalent of nuclear medicine--when a tracer is injected and followed through the human body."

Volunteers in New York and Seattle will allow individual pieces of their trash to be tagged with wireless location markers, known as "trash tags." The tags will calculate the ongoing location of each piece of trash and report back to a central server, where the data can be analyzed and viewed in real time.

"Trash Track aims to make the removal chain more transparent," says the lab's associate director, Assaf Biderman. "We hope that the project will promote behavioral change and encourage people to make more sustainable decisions about what they consume and how it affects the world around them."

Simulation of the Trash Tracker in action

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

Starting in September, the public will be able to see the results of the study online and at special exhibits at the Architectural League in New York City and the Seattle Public Library.

This cross section shows two rings of light-sensitive semiconductor material in the fiber. The eight thicker parts are electrodes to carry signals.

(Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

And you thought it was a problem when folks went into the locker room toting cell phones with cameras.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.

"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters.

MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area.

The technology uses fibers less than a millimeter in diameter, stretched into thin form from a thicker cylinder. Within the fibers are two cylindrical shells of semiconductor material, each connected to the outside world with four built-in metal electrodes.

Here is a mock-up of the EyeStop bus shelter.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

High-tech bus stops so cool they might actually entice you to take a ride will be installed next year in Florence, Italy.

The urban fixtures have been designed by a group of researchers led by Carlo Ratti, head of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The EyeStop is a touch-screen bus shelter that monitors environmental conditions and real-time bus movement and also provides information and communication tools that can interact with your cell phone.

The EyeStop, which has touch sensitive e-Ink screens as well as LEDs, features a bus map plotting locations in real-time, e-mail and Web access, tools for planning a best route and getting directions, a community bulletin board, and, of course, a place for silent video advertisements. It will also use sensors to monitor and display local air quality.

Riders can choose to have their local EyeStop bus stop sync with their cell phone. The EyeStop you normally frequent, for example, could twitter you that your usual bus is running late that morning.

Intended for tourists as well as locals, the EyeStop tools will be accessible in several languages.

About 1,000 EyeStop bus poles will be installed in Florence, Italy, in 2010.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

A bus pole version of the EyeStop with similar mapping, info, and communication tools will also be introduced. It glows brighter as the next bus nears the stop to signal pedestrians from afar.

The design for the EyeStop was unveiled this week at the Genio Fiorentino festival in Florence, and a prototype will soon follow.

Florence residents will start testing the high-tech bus stop's usefulness, durability, and limitations in October. Following that, about 200 bus shelters and 1,000 bus poles are expected to be installed next year. The EyeStop was developed by Ratti's project team, in collaborartion with the Province of Florence and Florence's local transportation authority.

The bus shelter and bus pole versions of the EyeStop will power themselves with solar energy, but they won't be one-size-fits-all.

Each EyeStop will be customized by a computer program that takes into account the stop's immediate surroundings. As a result, each can be built to fit into the existing space using steel, glass, and gray stone local to Florence. The software also considers maximum sunlight exposure for the location to determine power generation needs.

But is it graffiti proof?

"We have looked into special glass surfaces that are self-cleaning and graffiti proof," Ratti said in an e-mail. "However, we will perform some real tests before building the prototype in October."

This is EyeStop bus shelter with an imaginary user.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)