Date Posted: 3/15/2016

Jon Kleinberg's work with Prabhakar Raghavan on query-incentive networks has popped up in two recent news articles, a Medium piece on "Searching for Someone: From the “Small World Experiment” to the “Red Balloon Challenge,” and beyond," and a Bitcoin Magazine article on "The Rise of User-Monetized Actions: Bitcoin's Killer Application."

The Medium article gives a historical survey wherein Kleinberg's "landmark" Nature article on navigation in a small world and his and Raghavan's development of a "favor exchange" among individuals in a network play key roles.  Other Cornellians making an appearance include CAM PhD alum Duncan Watts, Steve Strogatz, and CS ugrad alum David Liben-Nowell. The article does sound an ominous note towards the end, though:  "Evil mutates and regenerates in the crowd in new forms impossible to anticipate by the designers or participants themselves. Crowdsourcing and its enemies will always be engaged in an co-evolutionary arms race."

The Bitcoin Magazine article explains how query-incentive networks influenced the winners of DARPA's "Red Balloon Challenge", and says that if one uses Bitcoin to "send microtransactions to their own network of followers, what you end up with is a variant of Kleinberg and Raghavan’s Query Incentive Network model that allows one to execute MapReduce-like operations over a large network of willing participants."

https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/searching-for-someone-688f6c12ff42#.bjlpnz2rf

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-rise-of-user-monetized-actions-bitcoin-s-killer-application-1454974133