Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ChildRescue (ChildRescue - Collective Awareness Platform for Missing Children Investigation and Rescue)

Teaser

Each year, over 250,000 children slip through the net of child protection systems in Europe as they go missing, following a wide range of reasons, ranging from runaways (national / international), abduction by a third person, international parental abduction, and missing...

Summary

Each year, over 250,000 children slip through the net of child protection systems in Europe as they go missing, following a wide range of reasons, ranging from runaways (national / international), abduction by a third person, international parental abduction, and missing unaccompanied migrant/refugee minors, to generally lost, injured or otherwise missing children . A special case of children that often go missing are unaccompanied refugee minors, who are exposed in enormous risks and their disappearance is usually underreported.
Currently, missing children alerts patterned after the Amber Alert System have been implemented in many European countries (named either Amber or Child Alert), while more and more EU countries develop similar alert systems. 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, and which can prove critical in finding the missing child.
Despite the current efforts at country and European level, several key challenges remain open:
• Insufficient capture and diffusion of information
• Lack of a mechanism that makes use and merges all available sources of information
• Lack of location focused distribution of alerts
• Difficulty in cross-referencing and determining the status of children discovered or registered with authorities
• Lack of cross-border cooperation between care institutions, law enforcement agencies and networks for missing children when it comes to responding to disappearances of unaccompanied minor refugees.
In this context, ChildRescue aspires to effectively reduce the primary period between the moment a child is reported missing and the one when it is found, by increasing accuracy and timeliness of publicly available information and by accelerating location-based audience targeting of the mobile alerts for missing children based on evidence-based predictions.
ChildRescue aims to be a prominent tool for missing children investigations in Europe, complementing law enforcement, the 116 000 hotline, the Missing Children response organisations and Voluntary Organisations, including Red Cross communities in all European countries, while also offering a unique solution for cross-stakeholder collaboration and identification of missing and unaccompanied minors.
The objectives of ChildRescue project are divided into three levels, namely:
• The Scientific level, focusing on the scientific and research work to be done to deliver a rigorous and self-standing methodology for the missing children’s investigation
• The Technical level, focusing on the delivery of the ChildRescue platform, through the implementation of novel, self-standing components and their integration under a common platform, and
• The Societal level, focusing on the evaluation and validation of the solution, the spread of the excellence gained and the real-life sustainability, supporting the identification of missing children in practice.

Work performed

During this first period of the project, the current processes were captured for each relevant use-case, described and visualised using BPMN, requirements were captured and integrated into AS-IS and TO-BE scenarios and user stories. At the same time, the project’s Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) was set up to include external, relevant, and independent experts that started providing feedback on specific deliverables and addressing the consortium’s considerations and evaluating its suggestions. Moreover, the regulatory framework for data protection, privacy, and ethical issues was analysed regarding the specific aspects of the DoA and the user requirements and validated through the EAB. During this period, the current technological and scientific landscape was studied and the first version of the ChildRescue methodology was defined and developed. A high-level ChildRescue data model and methodology for effectively taking advantage of the multiple layers and abstraction levels of data from multiple sources that can act as catalysts in the investigation and localisation process was designed. Additionally, the technical framework for handling sensitive personal information was defined and it has also been reviewed by the EAB.
Then, the methodological foundations for Profiling were laid down to include several system and computational theories, and the science of victimology, and complemented with the insights provided through interviews with professionals from pilot organisations and external actors. Building on this knowledge, the methodological approach for the multi-source analytics was developed, as well as the rules, processes and restrictions relevant to the privacy and the anonymisation of the data to be transferred, transformed and used within the operation of the pilots.
These actions led to the description of the conceptual architecture of platform and its components, as well as the integration approach and the design of the integrated security and privacy for the platform and app. At the same time the functional mock-ups were developed to describe the use of the platform and app for all the scenarios, use-cases and roles of the relevant processes, leading to the first Platform and App release that implements these requirements.
During this time, the framework by which the project’s results are evaluated was described, complementing the existing metrics with the expectations from the pilots and the further understanding of the priorities that needed to be defined. The achievement of these results helped form the guidelines and plan for the careful implementation of the pilot cases and the handbook for the end users.
During this period, the Dissemination, Communication and Stakeholder Engagement plan was formed, put into practice, the project’s website and Web 2.0 channels were put into place and content is being produced, published through them and recorded in the relevant reports, and the methodology for managing the project’s data was described and put into place. The project management processes, tools and guidelines were put into place and the project results were documented in M10. Lastly, the implementation of the ethics requirements was monitored and implemented by the consortium and validated from the EAB at each step of the way.
In general, the project’s implementation is characterised by a very fruitful cooperation, easy, fast response and amicable communication, and adherence to strict deadlines and high-quality standards for delivered results. The respect of these priorities and requirements is reflected in the timing of the submission of the deliverables, their quality, and the achievement of the milestones and Key Performance Indicators.

Final results

• Update and finalise Requirements
• Final ChildRescue Methodology
• Integration of all state-of-the-art analytics algorithms
• Updated/Final version of the ChildRescue platform and the mobile application
• Realisation of the pilots
• Pilots evaluation
• Results assessment
• Impact assessment
• Drive, monitor and accelerate user acquisition
• Finalise and implement the plan for the exploitation of ChildRescue beyond the project\'s life-cycle

Website & more info

More info: http://www.childrescue.eu.