A novel use of technology is helping to locate missing children around the world, including 9-year-old Phillista Waithera, who vanished in Nairobi in 2021. Two years later, she was reunited with her immediate family with the use of Face Age Progression (FAP) technology, which utilizes an Artificial Intelligence (AI) app to create photos of the child to show what they would look like now. In 2021 alone, the Kenyan nonprofit Missing Child Kenya Foundation located 298 children using AI, according to CEO and founder Maryanna Munyendo. And in central China’s Hubei Provence, a group of students at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) developed an AI system to restore and enhance old blurry photos of children who went missing decades earlier. More than 1,000 photos have been restored to improve clarity, helping reunite 11 missing children, like Sun Zhuo, a 4-year-old abducted in 2007 from his daycare in Shenzhen Province and rejoined with his biological parents in 2021 at age 18.
