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.