Tools for Finding Missing Persons

Search and Rescue personnel- from professional police officers to trained volunteers- provide an invaluable service to society, responding to locate vulnerable missing people and looking for them any time, any day, under any conditions. Being able to detect a vulnerable missing person when they are encountered is paramount to their recovery, with a ‘quick find’ being correlated with a safer outcome. SAR personnel undergo extensive training to be able to perform the activity of searching, including input on how best to search an area to maximise their level of assurance that this location has been searched. This training includes guidance on the most appropriate ways to search an area visually, moving one’s eyes and heads in specific ways.
This presentation showcases how eye-tracking technology, specifically eye-tracking glasses and screen-based solutions, can be used to better understand how people- and specifically searchers- can best move their eyes to detect hidden objects and other items of interest. This will be achieved by demonstrating how the technology works, and by sharing preliminary findings from several pilot studies that have been carried out so far. Join us to learn about the principles of searching and how science and research can help to improve searches for the vulnerable!

Minority ethnic individuals are disproportionately represented in missing persons cases, yet current reporting practices lack tailored tools to effectively gather critical information in these contexts.
This talk will disseminate findings of a collaborative research project involving researchers, police, and search and rescue professionals. The primary aim was to enhance missing persons reporting interviews to better safeguard vulnerable individuals, particularly those from ethnically diverse backgrounds.
We co-developed an evidence-informed interviewing approach that prioritises rapport-building and is sensitive to ethnic and cultural differences and reflects operational demands and relevant risk factors. Then, we experimentally examined how ethnicity influences the type and quality of information reported in missing person interviews, with a focus on descriptive details that aid identification. Findings will be discussed in relation to the implications for practice in order to improve investigative outcomes, and support more equitable police response in missing persons cases involving ethnic minorities.

In this talk, Morgan will introduce the current state of search and rescue technology, with a focus on how drones and AI are at the cutting edge of transforming the field. He will discuss how modern computer vision systems can assist and improve upon detecting objects within aerial imagery and what benefits it can provide as a tool to assist humans in the operations. This talk will also consider how ongoing research attempts to bridge the gap between practical AI deployment and academic research, providing a grounded perspective on what works, what doesn’t and what still needs to be solved.