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Maker
As a Nine year old, in early 90’s , an attempt was made to kidnap me. Although I was saved by a good samaritan the culprit was never caught.
Every 8 minutes a child goes missing in india. I want to take this spirit of helping others and really scale it .
You're tackling a real and big problem so I salute you for that. However once you have collected data how can it be used to help these kids?
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Maker
@Percival Thanks for checking us out. We have tie up with Non-governmental organization like S.O.C.H who have ~4 year experience in child rehabilitation . Child rehabilitation is a complex issue, specially mired with cultural and social roadblocks, S.O.C.H help us navigate around them and really provide them help.
*S.O.C.H : https://www.facebook.com/sochfor... .
Moreover we have broken our mission into two:
* Short term goal ( next 1-2 years ): Help missing and rescued children and keep collecting "publicly available" data with strategic partnerships with Government of India and other Government organizations.
* Long term goal ( 3-5 years) : Combat child trafficking using face recognition technology and data analytics. We will provide technology solutions to organizations who work in Anti-Trafficking. The solutions will help them collect and analyze data, over time, from photographs and locations, resulting in pattern recognition.
This is really great. Any idea about whether this could be expanded outside India? Both child trafficking and woman trafficking are big problems in a lot of other parts of the world.
I feel like face recognition alone won't work very well in this situation. There may be several years of age difference between the last official photo of the child and the one captured through the app. I would build a crowdsourcing interface where real people would go match the photos which are sorted by the system via face recognition cues and geo location.
Good luck with it
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Maker
Hello @erenbali , sorry for the delayed response, we just got stuck in something rather urgent.
1. Yeah, our long-term vision is to take helping faceless international but before we do scale to 7.1 billion people :) , we need to have working small scale pilot projects as proof of concept. And the one running in Mumbai/India is exactly that. A way to prove to governments and organizations that we are serious and this model works.
Our initial training data only included only children but nothing really stops us from expanding our training data, So we can surely expand to combating human(woman)-trafficking.
2. Its a three layered system : Our current Face-Recognition system has only accuracy in range 50-70% . So we bolster our confidence in matches by passing the similarity-test through our app users. Ex this screenshoot. https://lh5.ggpht.com/2me6WPI5Wr...
So the whole process goes like this
Face Recognition ---------(match)-----> Crowdsourced verification through app ----------(top 20%) ------> Manually verify ---------(success)----> Create automatic report to be sent to NGO's
Thanks for checking us out, and these much needed feedbacks from users keep us honest :)
Furthermore, if you want to share more on email or facebook . We are also available
1. community-manager@helpingfaceles...
2. https://www.facebook.com/helping...
Help me understand your data/photo collection strategy. There are 12MM people in just Mumbai so it seems you would need a massive userbase adding photos/data. Do you know how many you need to make this really work?
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Maker
@Percival
Organization like
* Don Bosco
* Arz
* Track missing children
* National database of missing children
who have been maintaining database of missing/ recovered/ runaway/ kidnapped children for at least 5-10 years now.
Our primary objective has been to cut through the bureaucracy and get access to that. Which we have been fairly successful giving us access to lot of "seed" data.
Rest of the data we get from our volunteers ( around 1000), who have been tirelessly collecting photos of children on mumbai streets. We match all these photos to the database to figure out identity.
Wow this is amazing - crowdsourcing millions, maybe billions of people towards a really important cause. Goodluck!
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Maker
@sievakozinsky Thanks man. We really need exposure on global scale and we have been leveraging social media as much as we can with our limited manpower.
if you are interested to know more, "Youth Ki Awaaz" gave us a nice coverage .
* www.youthkiawaaz.com/2014/08/nex...
Or if you want to see how we are using Ruby on Rails + Python to fight trafficking
* http://machinelearningmastery.co...
Help me understand the tech being used/built. Seems it would difficult to do facial recognition from old photos of kids given how much their appearance can change in just 1-2 years.
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@Percival
* We use Ruby on Rails for API Server and Dashboard : http://helpingfaceless.com
* Python for Analytics (Numpy / Scipy / timeseries / stats modules )
* We are trying to incorporate BigML into our pipeline ( https://bigml.com/ ) to really scale our operation .
* We use Apache storm to create a pipeline for information/photo handling ( cropping, face detection, moderation, match-verification-by-human )
* We have an version one android app and are currently building an iOS app.
* Currently we use openbr to of face-recognition but will be moving to something better soon.
Our Face recognition model for children works best within age group of 9-19 . We verify matches manually and also crowdsource the verification to increase our confidence in the match.
So the process goes like this
Face Recognition ---(match)-----> crowdsourced verification through app -----(top 20%) ------> manually verify ------> create automatic report to be sent to NGO's
You can read more about our tech here:
www.http://machinelearningmaster...
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