At the 2010 IEEE Atlanta Spring Banquet you'll hear from members of the Georgia Tech team that finished second in a national competition aimed at quickly locating 10 red weather balloons tethered at locations across the United States. You'll hear about the competition, how the team built a network of more than a thousand helpers, what they did to prepare for the event, what happened on the day of the event, and what social media tools they used to locate the nine balloons during the nine-hour competition.

Sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DARPA Network Challenge attracted hundreds of teams to tackle the problem of how to locate the balloons, which were positioned Dec. 5 at locations ranging from San Francisco and Portland to Memphis and Miami. DARPA's interest in the competition was in assessing how social networks could be used to address massive information-gathering tasks. In addition to its research component, the challenge also marked the 40th anniversary of the ARPANET, the forerunner of today's Internet.

ELIZABETH WHITAKER, Ph.D., is a Principal Research Engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Her primary research interests are artificial intelligence reasoning, representation, learning and modeling. Many of her research projects include hybrid representations and reasoning approaches including intelligent agents, case-based learning, planning and reasoning, and system dynamics.

ERICA BRISCOE, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist II at the Georgia Tech Research Institute with degrees in industrial engineering, information systems and cognitive psychology. Her research focuses on the modeling of behavioral processes for individuals and groups, visual perception, and concept formation and categorization.

ETHAN TREWHITT is a Research Engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. He works on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for building computational models of human behavior and other domains.