Biometrica’s role in platform for finding missing children revealed

Mar 14, 2019 | Chris Burt

In an effort to help locate missing children, the International Center for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) has launched a global platform which integrates Biometrica Systems’ eMotive criminal background checking software to track potential child abductors and traffickers in real time with facial biometrics.

ICMEC’s new GMCNgine platform consists of four key components, with eMotive providing mutli-jurisdictional 24×7 continuous criminal background checks.

“Through our work with Biometrica, we have the opportunity to strengthen our community to protect vulnerable children around the world,” says Caroline Humer, Director of ICMEC’s Global Missing Children’s Network (GMCN). “Members of our network will be able to access information to help generate leads to recover missing children. We are grateful for this opportunity.”

“eMotive will allow a GMCN member to upload profiles of adults believed to have been last seen with a missing child into an encrypted silo that sits beneath Biometrica’s 100 percent law enforcement-sourced multi-jurisdictional criminal database,” explains Biometrica CEO Wyly Wade. “Algorithms will then run 24×7 facial recognition and text checks of that data set against the data in the criminal database.”

The other core components of the system are provided by FIA (Federation for Internet Alerts), Web-IQ, which scrapes data to connect photos, which are compared against photos of missing children by AWS Rekognition. ICMEC’s Chief Technology Officer calls the system “an artificial intelligence search engine with global reach,” and says it will search for missing children across five continents.

Rescuing children from abduction and exploitation has been one of the use cases for facial recognition referred to by vendors seeking to balance associations of the technology with excessive public surveillance, including recently Microsoft.