Hackathon in Mexico helps find missing people through Artificial Intelligence

August
11, 2021

5 min read

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In Mexico, enforced disappearance is a serious problem that dates back many years. Tracking and identifying missing persons has always been a huge challenge, but today, thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), great strides are being made .

Although the concept of AI has existed for more than 60 years, with the phenomenal expansion of technologies and the capacity to process large volumes of information, the applications in this field have increased considerably in recent years, thus generating an impact every year. greater time and better results.

That is why the International Meeting on Artificial Intelligence and its Applications ( RIIAA ) , in conjunction with the National Search Commission ( CNB ) and the Center for Research in Mathematics ( CIMAT ), will carry out the Hackathon “Justice for the disappeared” , a 100% online meeting in which it will aspire to generate AI-based solutions for the analysis of thousands of relevant documents from the period of political repression in the country, and thus be able to clarify the fate of the victims.

It was between 1964 and 1985 when the Mexican State fiercely confronted and repressed those it conceived as its internal enemies: social movements, leaders of political-military organizations, supporters, and even their families and communities. To do this, he systematically used forced disappearance.

From that time, there are countless physical documents, progressively digitized as images, of which information needs to be integrated and structured.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the technologies that makes this task easier, since one of the main benefits of AI is that it allows you to efficiently manage larger volumes of data , which provides added value by organizing and analyzing documents in shorter times. and obtaining more accurate results.

Likewise, for the identification of faces, the AI analyzes dozens of details , such as the proportions of the face, the dimensions of the nose, the curvature of the corners of the mouth, the distance between the pupils of both eyes, among many other features of great value that are of great help in finding missing persons.

It is estimated that the use of new technologies, algorithms and deep learning models allow reaching a probability of more than 90% in the discovery of missing persons .

About Hackathon “Justice for the disappeared”

The Hackathon , which will take place from Friday 20 to Tuesday 24 August, is summoning teams of three to five people of Latin American origin to participate.

During these days the participants will face two great challenges:

1. Cleaning of images and entities: the teams will have to propose and develop a pre-processing flow to improve the quality of the historical images and detect the objects that compose them, their location and classification by similarity according to general categories including stamps. , signatures, handwriting, typewriting and photographs.
2. Text extraction: the objective here will be for the participants to propose and develop an image analysis flow for the extraction of texts from the documents with the highest possible quality and the extraction of entities (people, organizations, places and dates).

It should be noted that the teams will have scheduled sessions with mentors , who will be in charge of guiding them during the planning and execution of their proposals.

At the end of meeting , which also has the collaboration of Ai Lab School and Talentum , each challenge will be evaluated and awarded separately. Working groups that take first place in each category will be recognized with awards to help them continue their careers in developing AI solutions .

The award includes:

• 100% scholarship for all team members for the Ai Lab School program , with a value of $ 40,000 MXN.
• Scholarship worth $ 200 USD for free enrollment in the Talentum program, which includes 12 months of English classes, programming improvement sessions and access to Talentum advice to get a job in the USA (requirement: have a professional license or equivalent) .
• Gift certificate of your choice, worth $ 1000 MN (~ US $ 50) for each team member.
• Editorial coverage in the media.
• Letter of recommendation and recognition.

About Hackathons

Hackathons are community settings where ideas come to life through the right ecosystem for creativity, work, and entrepreneurship. Here you can create anything, there are no restrictions for your creativity. Among other events, teams come together to have a minimal valuable product or service to be tested. Hackers from around the world unite in their local hackathons , this is the place where new tech entrepreneurs are born into success and ingenuity.