Tag Challenge | Find All Suspects & Win $5000 | PlayTAG

TAG winner press release

tagchallenge — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:41:00 +0000

Download the TAG Winner Press release here or read it below.

Congrats to CrowdScanner! 3 outta 5 ain’t bad.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Crowdsourcing contest ends with partial victory for MIT team

Simulated person search sheds light on reach of social media;

Winning team locates “suspects” in three out of five cities in a single day.

Washington, D.C. – The 2012 TAG Challenge drew competition from teams across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, as participants organized online in an effort to locate five fictitious “jewel thieves” in the U.S. and Europe.

The best performing team, the MIT-affiliated CrowdScanner, found suspects in Bratislava, Washington DC, and New York City, and submitted their photographs to the contest website by 7:17pm EST, 17 hours after the contest began.

CrowdScanner located the suspects in New York and Bratislava approximately seven hours after the contest kicked off in those cities; the suspect in Washington was located 11 hours after the contest commenced there, with just an hour remaining.

“The project demonstrates the international reach of social media and its potential for cross-border cooperation,” said project organizer Joshua deLara. “Here’s a remarkable fact: a team organized by individuals in the U.S., the U.K and the United Arab Emirates was able to locate an individual in Slovakia in under eight hours based only on a photograph.”

No team was able to locate two additional suspects in Stockholm and London.

CrowdScanner team leader Iyad Rahwan, of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Dubai, declined to give premature estimates of the size and distribution of his team’s network, but estimated that there were “thousands aware and ready to submit as soon as they made a suspect sighting.”

The team’s strategy was designed partly by Manuel Cebrian of MIT, who also helmed the team that won the 2009 DARPA red balloon challenge. As with the DARPA challenge, the winning team’s strategy used chained recruitment incentives to build a vast network of spotters.

The TAG Challenge offered $5,000 to the first team to submit pictures of all five suspects. As CrowdScanner only located three out of five suspects, they will receive a prorated award of $3,000.

A number of other teams participated in the competition, including the DC-based Tag Team, Louisiana-based Team Rave, and GreenTagTeam, a team affiliated with Ben Gurion University in Israel. Each team relied on slightly different strategies. Tag Team was able to successfully locate the suspect in New York, while Team Rave nabbed the suspect in Bratislava.

“We believe the outcome will provide plenty of ammunition for both sides of the social media debate,” said challenge co-organizer Steve Miller. “No one was able to find all five individuals. There may be limits to what social media can help people accomplish in time-critical situations, or internationally.”

The TAG Challenge was organized by graduate students from six countries, the result of a series of conferences on social media and transatlantic security. The project was funded by Young Leaders Dialogue with America, a program of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Prague, and administered by the Institute of International Education.

A full project report, examining strategies and possible applications for law enforcement and public safety, will be released by May 31.

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Click here to download the press release.

TAG is going big

tagchallenge — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:56:50 +0000

Boom. It’s really happening now. We’re warming up the engines at TAG Challenge headquarters. We’re going to spread the word, starting with the following press release. Feel free to read it, memorize it, print it out, frame it and mail it to your mom – whatever you want. The world is your oyster!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

State Dept. Sponsors International Game of Tag with Cash Prize

Gamers challenged to locate five “jewel thieves” in U.S. and Europe

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The 2012 Tag Challenge calls on technology enthusiasts from several nations to set their sleuthing skills loose on a mock gang of jewel thieves in an international search contest to take place Saturday, March 31.

The social gaming contest will have participants use technological and social resources to locate and photograph five “suspects” in five different cities—Washington, D.C., New York City, London, Stockholm, and Bratislava—based only on a picture and a short description of each one.

The first person to upload pictures of all five suspects to the Tag Challenge website will earn international bragging rights—and a cash prize of $5,000.

The contest, organized by graduate students from six different countries and sponsored by the US Department of State, the US Embassy in Prague, and the Institute for International Education, is part of an ongoing assessment of the value of social networks as tools for international cooperation and public safety.

“It has become increasingly obvious over the past few years that open source information, especially in an age of social networking, can be at least as valuable as classified information,” said Marion Bowman, formerly a Deputy Director in the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy.

“This exercise demonstrates the globalization of open source,” he continued.

A similar feeling was echoed by Gary Anderson, who served as the first Director of the Marine Corps’ Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities and then directed the National Center for Unconventional Thought at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

“This experiment could give us new insights on tracking terrorists and finding missing children,” Anderson said. “It is ‘out of the box’ thinking at its best.”

Since the advent of social networks, various branches of the US government have launched similar initiatives to research their utility in the public sector.

Most notably, the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge awarded $40,000 to a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for being the first to send in the coordinates of ten red weather balloons stationed across the United States.

For more information about the details and rules of the Tag Challenge, visit the official website, www.tag-challenge.com, or email tagchallenge@gmail.com.

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Download it: 2012 TAG Challenge Press Release

TAG update 1/16

tagchallenge — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:29:55 +0000

We’re winding up the awesome here at TAG headquarters. We’re getting things moving, generating buzz, minding our Ps and Qs, and making sure we’ve got our ducks in a row for the March 31st event.

Stuff is coming down the pipe soon. Here on this page we will publish additional information about the challenge. There could be more background data, heck, there might even be some clues that will help you in your search for the suspects. All of this in good time. Rest assured, more updates are on the way.

If you want to keep up to date on all the latest TAG Challenge info, you should also make sure to keep tabs on our Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Welcome to Tag Challenge

Peter — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:39:00 +0000

The TAG Challenge is a social gaming event, schedule for Spring 2012. We want to test how crowdsourcing can be used more effectively and more responsibly for public safety. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!