Helping out Haiti
Project Description
When a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January, finding missing family and friends was an urgent need for people all over the globe. The Extraordinaries, a for-profit social enterprise that uses the power of business and crowdsourced labor* to solve social problems, asked for Exygy’s help to complete building a facial recognition matching system that allows the crowd to match photos of the missing with photos coming in from the ground in Haiti.
The tool was built to help desperate families get information about their missing loved ones. Like everyone else, we were horrified by the human suffering we saw in the news reports from Haiti and we wanted to contribute in some way. The Exygy staff put on our volunteer hats and worked emergency hours to help The Extraordinaries build a system that allowed people the chance to help others find loved ones by tagging news images coming out of Haiti and matching those images to faces of the missing.
Thousands participated: over 76,000 image tags were submitted, 8,137 news photos were collected, 746 possible matches of missing persons were discovered and there were 24 matches good enough to contact the family of the missing person.
Thanks to The Extraordinaires for inviting us to participate in this exciting and important project. We’re looking forward to collaborating more with Ben, Jacob, and the rest of the team in the near future.