Teaming with the European Federation for Missing and Sexually Exploited Children, the Hellenic Red Cross and the Smile of the Child, UBITECH is participating at the kick-off meeting, in Athens, Greece (January 18-19, 2018), of the ChildRescue CAPS Innovation Action, officially started on January 1st, 2018. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 780938) and spans on the period January 2018 – December 2020. The ChildRescue project aims to 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.
ChildRescue will provide evidence-based insights for the network effect’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 using an intelligent system, citizens close to points a missing child was last seen or where a missing child is probable to be found become “social sensors” for the investigation, paying attention to people passing by, contributing and validating potential evidence.
Within ChildRescue, UBITECH R&D team will be responsible for realizing the process of enabling end-to-end pseudo-anonymisation and intelligent handling of sensitive personal information, adopting various techniques (e.g. data masking, shredding and archiving techniques) in order both to take advantage of all evidences which can be of value while investigating for a missing person, but also to take into account important privacy and personal data protection issues (e.g. providing the opportunity for anonymized clues to be submitted to the investigation and erasing all case data after its closure), and to ensure privacy and security of the engaged (private) data. Moreover, UBITECH will drive the design and development of the ChildRescue mobile application that will adopt the cross-platform mobile development paradigm incorporating selected key features of the ChildRescue platform.
Finally, UBITECH will heavily contribute in the implementation of the ChildRescue platform comprising a Collaboration Space allowing all investigators to securely share location-based, multi-media information regarding the investigation in groups (per rescue team), with specific access rights, or publicly; a Notification Engine which provides a scalable and flexible mechanism for managing and delivering mobile notification messages based on predefined predicates; a Data Anonymisation & Synchronization Engine which ensures end-to-end protection of the data privacy and anonymity of the stakeholders involved in the missing person case; a Profiling Engine, generating the missing person profile, by compiling multilayer information, as collected from a plethora of sources in real time; and a Prediction Engine, with the purpose of learning from experience and predicting the missing person’s routes.
