Tech helps cut government spend on shelters

By LI LEI | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2019-06-13 22:09

Share - WeChat

Robin Li Yanhong, Chairman and CEO of Baidu, speaks at the main forum during the first World Intelligence Congress, also known as WIC2017, in Tianjin, China, 29 June 2017. [Photo/IC]

Technology has helped find missing people and slashed government expenditure running shelters, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs on Thursday.

The ministry said in a press release that tech giant Baidu and ByteDance, which owns news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and streaming platform Douyin, have made use of their technologies to help identify homeless people in a bid to reconnect them with their families.

Baidu, a Chinese pioneer in artificial intelligence, alongside the ministry launched a program last year to identify long-time shelter seekers using its facial-recognition technology.

The homeless are mostly seniors or people with special educational needs who failed to offer adequate information and ended up stranded in the facilities.

The company has since compared the facial images of more than 200,000 people with a database provided by the ministry and the public security authorities, consisting of the personal data of those reported missing by relatives.

The ministry said almost 6,500 people have been reunited with their families so far, reducing the burden on publicly funded relief stations intended to provide temporary shelter.

Zhou Da, who oversees the Baidu Foundation and the company's charitable initiatives, said the company's technology has been efficient and more accurate than humans.

"The system could even tell the difference between almost all identical twins," he said.

Interior view of the headquarters of ByteDance at the headquarters of Beijing Bytedance Technology Co, owner of Chinese personalized news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and short video platform Douyin (TikTok), in Beijing, China, March 12, 2019. [Photo/IC]

Another tech firm the ministry signed up is ByteDance. The company's apps can notify users close to where people go missing and help collect clues of their whereabouts.

Almost 37,000 such notifications have been sent and 7,456 cases concluded successfully, the ministry said.

The employment of latest technologies has helped address the shelters' overcrowding problem.

As of May, there were 34,805 people in shelters, compared with almost 50,000 in 2017, the ministry said.

A total of 5 billion yuan ($722 million) in public funds have been saved since the technology was first used in 2015, it said.

Photo