Global EditionASIA 中文雙語Fran?ais
    China
    Home / China / Society

    Tech firms help reunite homeless with families

    By Li Lei | China Daily | Updated: 2019-06-20 07:59
    Share
    Share - WeChat

    Employees at a homeless shelter in Guangdong province asked for help from a popular news aggregator, toutiao.com, to locate the family of a mentally ill man long stranded at the facility earlier this month.

    Using geo positioning, the app, which has millions of followers nationwide, quickly sent out tens of thousands of notifications to users in the southeast of the province to see if anyone knew him. The employees at the Dongguan Relief Station believed the man was from the region. His suspected name as well as those of his parents were included in the message.

    Hours later, a call came in saying the man, who had been at the shelter for about 20 months, was their relative Liu Shen, who had gone missing 20 years ago.

    Liu is one of many longtime shelter residents who have been reunited with their families, thanks to the assistance of tech firms such as ByteDance, which owns toutiao.com and streaming platform Douyin, and tech giant Baidu.

    According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, toutiao.com has sent out almost 37,000 notifications since the ministry signed up the app in 2016 to help trace people. A total of 7,456 cases have been concluded successfully.

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

    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 of usually less than 10 days.

    The efforts have helped longtime shelter residents - mostly seniors or people with special educational needs who failed to offer adequate information and ended up stranded in the facilities - return home more quickly.

    Zhou Da, who oversees the Baidu Foundation and the company's charitable initiatives, said the company's technology has in some instances been more effective than human efforts to identify people.

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

    Fewer stranded residents have helped reduce management risks, slashed public funding by billions of yuan, and helped ease the shelters' pressure against the backdrop of the central government cutting many positions in the government reshuffle early this year.

    Lin Jiawei, a social worker at the shelter in Dongguan who oversaw Liu Shen's return, said the support from tech giants had accelerated the home-return process and reduced problems at the centers such as overcrowding and lack of funding.

    "Longtime shelter-seekers, mostly seniors with dementia or people with mental problems, have to share rooms in groups of seven or eight, which is worrisome given the limited staff at government funded relief stations," he said.

    Lin added that there were almost 150 shelter-seekers whose stay exceeded three months when he began working there in September. But the number was down to about 90 at the end of May, with many sent home with assistance from the tech firms.

    The Ministry of Civil Affairs said there were 34,805 people in shelters as of May, compared with almost 50,000 in 2017.

    A total of 5 billion yuan ($722 million) in public funds had been saved over the last four years, it said.

    Top
    BACK TO THE TOP
    English
    Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
    License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

    Registration Number: 130349
    FOLLOW US
     
    中文字幕日韩欧美| 亚洲综合中文字幕无线码| 中文字幕一区二区人妻| 无码乱人伦一区二区亚洲一| 国内精品久久久人妻中文字幕| 久久久久久国产精品免费无码| 免费A级毛片无码无遮挡内射| 佐藤遥希在线播放一二区| 精品无码人妻夜人多侵犯18| 四虎影视无码永久免费| 亚洲一区精品中文字幕| 亚洲AⅤ无码一区二区三区在线| 最近2019在线观看中文视频| 人妻丰满?V无码久久不卡| 人妻丰满熟妞av无码区| 亚洲精品无码永久在线观看你懂的| 亚洲日韩欧美国产中文| 久久超乳爆乳中文字幕| 最近中文字幕在线中文高清版| 国产精品无码成人午夜电影| 无码人妻久久一区二区三区免费丨 | 亚洲综合无码AV一区二区 | 最好看的中文字幕最经典的中文字幕视频| 成人无码免费一区二区三区| 日韩AV无码久久一区二区| 亚洲AV无码国产精品麻豆天美| 亚洲午夜国产精品无码| 精品欧洲av无码一区二区14| 中文字幕无码高清晰| 亚洲精品中文字幕乱码三区| 中文字幕无码一区二区三区本日 | 成人性生交大片免费看中文| 久久精品中文字幕一区 | 天堂亚洲国产中文在线| 亚洲AV永久无码精品一区二区| 无码人妻丰满熟妇区五十路| 久久久久无码精品| 中文字幕久久波多野结衣av| 久久久久久久人妻无码中文字幕爆| 亚洲AV无码专区在线播放中文 | 中文字幕在线视频第一页|