“The Smile of the Child” contributes to the kick-off meeting of the Project entitled “ChildRescue – Collective Awareness Platform for Missing Children Investigation and Rescue”
30 January 2018
22 January 2018
“The Smile of the Child” contributed to the kick-off meeting of the ChildRescue Project, held on the 18th and 19th of January at the premises of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).
ChildRescue is a 36-month project which involves 10 organizations in total from 6 different EU countries. The project coordinator is the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and the Scientific Coordinator is Prof. Ioannis Psarras, Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Management & Decision Support Systems Laboratory.
The project’s consortium consists of two specialized organizations at the management of cases of missing children in Greece (The Smile of the Child) and Belgium (Child Focus), the European Federation for Missing and Sexually Exploited Children (Missing Children Europe - MCE) in Belgium and the Hellenic Red Cross. The consortium also consists of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences and the following companies:
● SingularLogic Romania Computer Applications S.R.L (SiLO) - Romania
● UBITECH Ltd - Cyprus
● MADE GROUP - Greece
● Suite5 Data Intelligence Solutions Ltd (SUITE5) - Ireland
Through an innovative approach on the missing children investigation cycle, ChildRescue will be instrumental in leveraging the collective awareness, resourcefulness and action for a humanitarian cause: to expedite more rapid and effective resolution of missing children cases. The project will also take special care for supporting the identification missing unaccompanied refugee minors, which is an emerging issue nowadays.
ChildRescue will explore patterns of interaction and awareness during the missing children investigations, leveraging the untapped potential of open-social-linked data to augment the background information of missing children through multi-layer (personal, psychological, social and activity) profiling and predictive analytics, respecting and protecting privacy and personal data.
In addition, ChildRescue will provide evidence-based insights for the network’s impact to the missing children response organizations and allow them make informed decisions for each case. Based on location-based mobile notifications that spread information using an intelligent system, citizens close to the points where a missing child was last seen or where s/he is probable to be found become “social sensors” for the investigation, paying attention to people passing by, contributing and validating potential evidence.
ChildRescue will deliver a modular, open source solution to be adopted by different organizations, according to their needs and the readiness of their systems. The project’s results will be piloted in (a) missing children cases and (b) missing unaccompanied minors cases by the partners who are responsible for the Amber Alert and 116000 hotline in those countries and the Hellenic Red Cross, in complementarity with existing models of operation. Missing Children Europe (MCE) will ensure the visibility of the results across all relevant response and volunteer organizations in Europe.
All steps and procedures for the implementation of the project and the timeline were discussed in detail during the two day meeting as well as factors that should be taken into account for the implementation of the project in partnership with national authorities and on the basis of the experience and expertise that will pilot test the mobile application and the platform.
The project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 780938
