French American Charitable Trust Suppported Mobile Tech Project Helps Reunite Loved Ones in Haiti
The Extraordinaries, a mobile technology project that helps connect volunteers with community need, has been deployed in Haiti to help find missing people and reunite them with their families.
[SOURCE: Netsquared.org, January 21, 2010]
Since the earthquake struck one week ago, there have been a number of technology organizations (from Google to Ushahidi to Frontline SMS Medic), working around the clock with the State Department on a coordinated effort, that uses technology to support the relief efforts in Haiti. The Extraordinaries is one part of this larger initiative.
Visit the Haiti support page here.
HOW OUR SYSTEM WORKS
With
The Extraordinaries' system, volunteers can help find loved ones
missing in the Haiti Earthquake using two minutes of their spare time,
from any computer.
There are three basic components to the system.
The Image Tagger — Volunteers sort through news photos coming out of
Haiti and categorize (tag) them with keywords like “adult, child,
alive, deceased.” Never before has there been a system that can bring
together thousands of photos from across the web and have them sorted
by live human beings (no computer could ever know that there is a
teenager in a photo).
The Matcher — We’ve engineered a system
that matches faces of missing people to faces in news photos that we've
sorted with the image tagger above. Volunteers look at a photo of a
missing person, compare it to a news image, and see if they can find a
match.
The Search Engine — As volunteers sort through images
with the image tagger, they are fed into the Extras’ “search engine”.
This system allows families to search through images taken
post-earthquake in Haiti, and specify certain characteristics. For
example, if a family is looking for their missing mother, they can use
the search engine to find images that volunteers have tagged with
“adult” and “female.” Their mother might be in one of those photos.
RESULTS
Over
2,000 volunteers have taken action in the last few days alone. To-date,
their efforts have resulted in 44,573 image tags and 273 potential
matches (with 7 good enough to contact the families). We've also had
over 700 searches queried by families looking for missing loved ones.
WHAT IT MEANS
This
is one of the first cases where you can *actually* help disaster relief
efforts from your personal computer. Have a few extra minutes at work?
Is there a commercial break on T.V.? Adopt a missing person and search
for their face in news photos.
The crowd can use their spare time and energy to help give desperate families news about their loved ones.