Tag Challenge win mentioned in Dubai's Vision magazine

Vision, a quarterly magazine in Dubai, has published a feature on crowdsourcing in its online version, focusing heavily on the research we did in SCAILab and our win in the US State Department's Tag Challenge last year. Check it out at this link; our lab's head was interviewed, and our Tag Challenge team's photo is in the album in the left-side column.

veri.ly mentioned in a TEDx talk

The veri.ly crowd-sourced crisis information verification platform, which we at MIST's SCAILab were developing when I left, was recently mentioned in a TEDxTraverseCity talk by QCRI's Patrick Meier (one of the lead collaborators in this project), along with earlier work on the DARPA Network Challenge.

arXiv article on social mobilization mentioned in New Scientist and MIT Technology Review

With the current interest in the idea of the crowd-sourced manhunt after the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, our article at arXiv.org has been featured in an MIT Technology review article and in a New Scientist article (the latter also featuring our veri.ly project for crowd-sourced disaster response)

Rahwan, I., Dsouza, S., Rutherford, A., Naroditskiy, V., McInerney, J., Venanzi, M., Jennings, N., Cebrian M. (2012) "Global Manhunt Pushes the Limits of Social Mobilization", Computer, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 68-75, April, 2013

And to compound the honor of our social mobilization work being published in PNAS, we also had work on a related topic published in IEEE Computer magazine this month. It was complemented in the same issue by an editorial piece "Equal Before the Bar", written by David Alan Grier himself, in which he describes his role in our victory, and why it is significant to the field of study. This one was about the US State Department Tag Challenge, a social mobilization challenge that our lab played a leading role in winning as Team CrowdScanner (web application developed by me for the challenge).

From the article:

Using social media and only the targets’ mug shots, a team competing in the
US State Department-sponsored Tag Challenge located three of five targeted
people in five cities in the US and Europe in less than 12 hours.
...
The Tag Challenge was significantly harder than the
Red Balloon Challenge because it required locating people
in highly populated cities, where the pace of life can help
people “hide in plain sight,”
 and making it much more difficult to spot the suspects than to find large red balloons.
Furthermore, people are mobile, making it difficult to rule
out locations that have already been visited.