I can see you…

Tamsin Oxford investigates the AI platform that never stops searching for missing children: Gmcngine – built to behave like a parent.

The artificial intelligence platform that never stops searching for missing children. Tamsin Oxford investigates Gmcngine, built to behave like a parent.

Staggeringly, an estimated eight million children are reported missing every year. According to research undertaken by the US Department of Justice in 2002, a child goes missing every 90 seconds. Every year 20,000 children go missing in Australia, 45,288 in Canada, 100,000 in Germany, and 60,742 in the United Kingdom.

Some return on their own, a few are found, while many are lost forever. The parents of these children never stop searching for them, never stop hoping that one day their child will come home. This absolute determination to seek out what is lost inspired the creation of Gmcngine – a free, multilingual platform built in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Federation for Internet Alerts (FIA), Motorola Solutions Foundation, Biometrica, Facebook, WEB-IQ and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC).

The solution uses open source protocols and software stacks to integrate a multitude of open source and some proprietary technologies into one cohesive ecosystem that allows for interoperability across

platforms and countries. Gmcngine blends the best of big open data and open source technologies into one elegant solution, one that would not be possible without them.

Mike Cachine, Chief Technology Officer at ICMEC, was one of the driving forces behind the Gmcngine and its development. “What we have done is build on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, using it to take the data we have in our system and teaching it to become a parent,” he says. “We know that the parent of a missing child will never give up and that is what we want our AI to emulate: that parent, constantly searching through the data to find their missing child,” he says.

Today, Gmcngine combines artificial intelligence (AI), search tools, facial recognition software and digital advertising to help locate missing children. The platform uses geo-targeting and dynamic ad insertion to place missing children alerts in front of the right people at the right times. The machine learning and AI models ceaselessly scour the dark web and the clear web for images that match those of missing children, constantly looking for potential matches that can help law enforcement and government find them.