Complementing Amber Alert: Increasing the social sensors' effectiveness through focused communication channels

Abstract

The general idea of the AMBER/Child Alert System is that by broadcasting and distributing information about a missing child to the community, the public's involvement can trigger critical feedback that would have otherwise been ignored. This feedback, in several cases, can be proved decisive in finding the missing child. Despite the efforts at country and European level to effectively address the issue of missing children, a number of key challenges remain open, including lack of location-focused distribution of alerts, insufficient capture and diffusion of information, and lack of a mechanism that uses and merges all available sources of information. The aim of this paper is to present a novel approach for handling such challenges through a data analytics platform and a mobile application available to all citizens. Using the active research fields of human mobility pattern analysis and machine learning, we show that missing children investigations, as well as search and rescue operations, can be actively supported and enhanced when multiple data sources are combined and analyzed.

A Collective Awareness Platform for Missing Children Investigation and Rescue

“…To accomplish that goal, system theories, such as Activity Theory and Collective Behaviour Theory, are analysed along with methods and scientific fields stemming from the computer science, such as Social Network Analysis and Machine Learning for modelling human behaviour, to construct reliable activity and behaviour profiles of children from both a technological and a sociological perspective. Profiling information of the missing child is then combined with open data, like geographic and transportation data, along with insights and patterns revealed from pattern matching of similar past cases, to deduce potential Points of Interest (POIs) and consequently routes and directions that the investigation should follow, in an evidence-based and scientifically-sound manner, the preliminary findings of which approach can be found in (Michalitsi-Psarrou et al 2019).…”

Agent-Based Simulation to Measure the Effectiveness of Citizen Sensing Applications—The Case of Missing Children

“…We focus our solution on a specific problem, the missing children issue, where a mobile application for the general public is developed to involve citizens and volunteers in missing children investigations [17]. The application broadcasts mobile alerts, sharing public information about an active case to all users that have the application installed on their mobile phones.…”