#haiti Quake: Help find missing persons with @extraordinaries! http://beextra.org/haiti

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti, killing possibly thousands and leaving the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince in ruins. The damage this disaster has caused is still unmeasurable as friends and families around the globe try to contact loved ones while thousands of others continue searching for ways to help.

The Extraordinaries have created a support page to harness the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons with just a few minutes of your time.

Via http://beextra.org/haiti, people can upload information about their loved ones or sort through news photos to help identify missing persons. Our team is working around the clock to build a facial recognition matching system that will allow the crowd to match photos of the missing with photos coming in from the ground in Haiti.

In just a few spare moments of time, people around the globe can reach out to those affected by the quake and help reconnect the missing with their families and friends!

Comments

[Keith]

I've been doing face matching for an hour, found a couple possibles.

One thing I've noticed is that the photos on the right repeat, a lot. Are there just a lot of duplicates, or is there a reason to throw an image back into the loop again even if the photo on the left hasn't changed?

Keep up the great work.
Keith

[Alison]

I've found the same Keith, but in a way it's useful as I am getting to know some of the images so well I sometimes know which one I'm looking for to try and match a 'missing' photo with. It can be tedious trying to get it to come up again though. I've managed it once and flagged a possible match as a result.

The option to sort match photos by male/female young/adult/elderly is great!

[Ben]

Thanks for the comments - Yes, there's a preponderance of duplicates, due to the way that the images are tagged and stored in the database... We're in the process of writing a de-duper, but it's interesting to hear from Alison that there may be some utility in it.

[Joan Rowlands]

Millions have lost everything in the quake – homes, food, jobs! For the next 12 months, the World Food Programme says 2 million people will need critical food assistance! If you want to help and learn more about the crisis response, go to: ">http://wfp.org/crisis/haiti> or you can text FRIENDS to 90999 to make a $5 donation.