The MyHeartMap Challenge is a community improvement initiative and part of a research study being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania to map automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in the city of Philadelphia.
The challenge takes the form of a contest wherein the person or team to find and report the locations of the maximum number of AED devices in the city gets a grand prize of USD 10,000, provided at least 750 AEDs are reported in total or 500 AEDs are reported by a single team. 20 to 200 "Golden" AEDs have also been identified in advance, photos of which will gain the submitter a USD 50 prize. [1] The challenge runs from January 31 through March 13 of the year 2012. The challenge has drawn interested from various quarters, including academic institutions who are participating with the aim to build up and study a more intelligent crowdsourcing campaign. [2]
The MyHeartMap Challenge is an example of crowdsourcing, an approach to accomplishing tasks by opening them to the public. The organizers of the challenge were inspired by the DARPA Network Challenge, in which teams completed to locate 10 red weather balloons placed at random locations all over the United States. According to the MyHeartMap Challenge Director Dr. Raina Merchant, "DARPA succeeded with locating red balloons. AEDs are a natural extension of a brilliant idea." [3]
Given the scale of the challenge, the most likely winner is going to be a team rather than an individual. A global effort to assemble a large team is underway, organized by computer scientists from MIT, UCSD, Masdar Institute, and University of Southampton. The team, dubbed HeartCrowd, [2] includes some of the winners of the DARPA Network Challenge, which inspired the MyHeartMap Challenge. [4]
The challenge officially ended on Tuesday, March 27, 2012, and the individuals were announced several weeks after.
According to the organizers, over 1,500 AEDs were submitted from 300 teams and individuals. [5]
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use. The initial DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 was created to spur the development of technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. The 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots, and new Challenges are still being conceived. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was tasked with building robotic teams to autonomously map, navigate, and search subterranean environments. Such teams could be useful in exploring hazardous areas and in search and rescue.
Topcoder is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community services to corporate, mid-size, and small-business clients. Topcoder also organizes the annual Topcoder Open tournament and a series of smaller regional events.
John F. Kennedy Stadium, formerly Philadelphia Municipal Stadium and Sesquicentennial Stadium, was an open-air stadium in Philadelphia that stood from 1926 to 1992. The South Philadelphia stadium was on the east side of the far southern end of Broad Street at a location now part of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex. Designed by the architectural firm of Simon & Simon in a classic 1920s style with a horseshoe seating design that surrounded a track and football field, at its peak the facility seated in excess of 102,000 people. Bleachers were later added at the open (North) end. The shape of the stadium resembles the horseshoe configuration of Harvard Stadium built in 1903.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
Traffic reporting is the near real-time distribution of information about road conditions such as traffic congestion, detours, and traffic collisions. The reports help drivers anticipate and avoid traffic problems. Traffic reports, especially in cities, may also report on major delays to mass transit that does not necessarily involve roads. In addition to periodic broadcast reports, traffic information can be transmitted to GPS units, smartphones, and personal computers.
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
Forepaugh Park was a baseball ground located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at Broad and Dauphin Streets in North Philadelphia. It had an estimated capacity of 5,000. The ground was home to the Philadelphia Quakers of the Players' League in 1890 and the American Association in 1891. The ballpark featured a bicycle track and was a popular velodrome in Philadelphia in the early 1890s. The ballpark was owned by and named for Adam Forepaugh and the grounds used for circuses and various types of exhibitions until 1894. The property was sold for development and residences constructed in 1895.
There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.
The 2009 DARPA Network Challenge was a prize competition for exploring the roles the Internet and social networking play in the real-time communications, wide-area collaborations, and practical actions required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The competition was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research organization of the United States Department of Defense. The challenge was designed to help the military generate ideas for operating under a range of circumstances, such as natural disasters. Congress authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their use for national security.
Citizen sourcing is the government adoption of crowdsourcing techniques for the purposes of (1) enlisting citizens in the design and execution of government services and (2) tapping into the citizenry's collective intelligence for solutions and situational awareness. Applications of citizen sourcing include:
DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011 was a prize competition for exploring methods to reconstruct documents shredded by a variety of paper shredding techniques. The aim of the challenge was to "assess potential capabilities that could be used by the U.S. warfighters operating in war zones, but might also identify vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected by shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community". The competition was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA’s mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their use for national security.
The Tag Challenge is a social gaming competition, with a US$5,000 reward, in which participants were invited to find five "suspects" in a simulated law enforcement search in five different cities throughout North America and Europe on March 31, 2012. It aimed to determine whether and how social media can be used to accomplish a realistic, time-sensitive, international law enforcement objective. The challenge was won by a team that located 3 of the 5 suspects.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was a prize competition funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Held from 2012 to 2015, it aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that could do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments." The DRC followed the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challenge. It began in October 2012 and was to run for about 33 months with three competitions: a Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) that took place in June 2013; and two live hardware challenges, the DRC Trials in December 2013 and the DRC Finals in June 2015.
Crowdsourcing software development or software crowdsourcing is an emerging area of software engineering. It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing. These tasks are normally conducted by either members of a software enterprise or people contracted by the enterprise. But in software crowdsourcing, all the tasks can be assigned to or are addressed by members of the general public. Individuals and teams may also participate in crowdsourcing contests.
Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage their constituents' collective knowledge and experience. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referendums, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
Patexia Inc. is a privately held intellectual property (IP) company based in Santa Monica, California, U.S. The company was founded in 2010 with the mission to enhance transparency and efficiency in the IP field through a leveraging of the knowledge of an IP-based online community of researchers, attorneys, and stakeholders—described by the company as a “multidisciplinary social network”—for the purpose of information crowdsourcing. In addition, the company combines patent and litigation databases to provide analytical tools regarding the IP field, including the details of attorneys, law firms, companies, and examiners, for its community members.
Iyad Rahwan, is a Syrian-Australian scientist. He is the director of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Between 2015 and 2020, he was an associate professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, where he has investigated topics in computational social science, collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of artificial intelligence.
Raina Martha Merchant is an American emergency medicine specialist, a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She is the associate vice president and director of the Center for Digital Health in Penn Medicine and associate professor of emergency medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Over the years, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted a number of prize competitions to spur innovations. A prize competition allows DARPA to establish an ambitious goal, which makes way for novel approaches from the public that might otherwise appear too risky to undertake by experts in a particular discipline.