Empowering Social Good
Through Technology

A missing child is every parent’s worst nightmare. In 1981, that nightmare became a reality for John and Reve Walsh when their 6-year-old son, Adam Walsh, went missing in Florida. At the time of Adam’s disappearance, a system for finding missing children just didn’t exist in the US. Authorities were slow to respond and without a process to gather tips or information from someone who might have unknowingly witnessed Adam’s abduction, it was as if Adam had vanished without a trace. Sadly, Adam’s body was recovered two weeks after his disappearance.

About 20 years later, Alicia Kozak was kidnapped at age 13. Her abductor took her several states away from her home and held her in a basement dungeon he had built in his home. He then livestreamed her being abused.

The outcome was different this time.

In the aftermath of the Adam Walsh tragedy, his parents created the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (NCMEC). In 2020, the NCMEC CyberTipline received more than 21.7 million reports.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions has partnered with NCMEC for the past 20 years in many ways, including the creation and donation of the technology behind the Automated Delivery of Alerts on Missing Children, known as The ADAM Program^TM.

The ADAM Program technology leverages the potency of photos ⸺ still the single most powerful tool in finding missing children ⸺ and harnesses the eyes of the public to help recover missing children.

It quickly distributes posters containing a photo and other critical information of a missing child to police, news media, schools, businesses, medical centers and individuals within a specific, targeted geographic area. Built in 2000, The ADAM Program continues to be maintained and upgraded by a team of volunteers at LexisNexis Risk Solutions to this day.

“Had my poster not been shared nationally, I would not be here today,” says Kozak, now an advocate for internet safety and missing persons. She was recovered four days after her abduction because someone recognized her from a missing child poster and alerted the FBI.

"Sadly, many of the critically missing and endangered children the U.S. Marshals seek to locate and recover are at-risk of becoming victims of sex trafficking, exploitation and abuse. Finding these vulnerable youth is part of our primary mission to protect communities,” says Donald Washington, Director of the U.S. Marshals Service. “We are proud to work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and our partners at federal, state, tribal and local agencies to locate, recover and protect endangered missing children."

Deeply affected by his brother’s disappearance and murder and the thousands of other cases he has witnessed since then, Cal Walsh is today a child advocate and spokesperson for NCMEC. Together with his dad, Cal also co-hosts 'In Pursuit with John Walsh' a television show on the Investigation Discovery Channel which profiles unsolved and ongoing high-profile crime stories. Cal says that by leveraging its core business solutions and expertise, LexisNexis Risk Solutions is able to quickly “identify the technologies that allow us to get those images out there faster, to even more people, and geo-targeted.”

“The technology allows us to use the power of the public, boots on the ground; it gives people the opportunity to do the right thing,” notes Walsh. “At the end of the day, it’s the public that is helping people reunite children with their loved ones.”

Sign up to receive missing child alerts in your area at adamprogram.com

Today, children account for nearly half of the 80 million people  who are estimated to have been forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide, owing to natural disasters, conflicts and other humanitarian emergencies. Understandably, education is a low priority at the time of an immediate crisis, but many displaced kids miss out on years of schooling, if they resume their studies at all.

“In the urgency of situations such as earthquakes or refugee crises, food, shelter and support are always a priority, and children often miss out on vital education for long periods of time, ” says Jake Tae Sang Cho, Head of Strategic Partnerships for the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Education), a non-profit organization that leverages support from businesses that are committed to ending the global education crisis.

For a child or young person caught up in crisis, education can be a lifesaver ⸺ providing a safe space, normalcy and hope for the future. In fact, in the absence of educational resources, children are often vulnerable to trafficking, child labor, early forced marriage or recruitment into armed groups; and sadly join part of a growing “lost generation” around the world.

Education, both as a humanitarian initiative and as ‘the great equalizer’ requires different kinds of resources. GBC-Education created the Rapid Education Action (REACT) initiative as a way to channel corporate contributions and resources to support education in emergencies. REACT matches business resources and assets with partners on the ground (such as UN agencies, NGOs, national governments and actors) to rapidly create and deploy solutions when and where they are needed. At the heart of the initiative is the REACT digital platform, which was built and donated by volunteers at LexisNexis Risk Solutions in 2018. The platform maps offers of tangible support and tracks educational challenges in need of a solution in real-time; and ultimately matches the two to disseminate new solutions at scale.

As Jake Tae Sang Cho notes, education is often addressed much later despite the detrimental effects to children’s personal growth and the later impacts on the economy in terms of a diminished level of productive citizens, future employees, employers and customers. The launch of the REACT digital platform set the foundation as a go-to source for business engagement in education in emergencies.
 
In Uganda, the largest host-country of refugees in Africa, the REACT platform has helped supply basic resources that many of us take for granted, such as wireless service and access to digital learning materials, to nearly 20,000 refugee children and helped build a much-needed technology center.

“We see it as our role to raise awareness and serve as a matchmaker between the needs and the resources, to really highlight what is happening “on the ground“ and that there are specific ways companies can help out,” says Cho.

Learn more about the REACT project at gbc-education.org

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the need for a way to properly track the virus to better understand its evolution quickly became evident. And while critical data was being collected by multiple sources, those sources were doing so separately, and in different ways.  

This created a situation where raw statistics were available, but there was very little analysis or context with which to understand exactly what was going on across the world. To help create a “big picture” of the global health crisis ⸺ that could be easily used by anyone ⸺ a team of volunteers created the LexisNexis Risk Solutions COVID-19 Tracker.

Based on a similar project that the team developed to track the Ebola virus, the COVID-19 Tracker offers insights to health officials, researchers and curious individuals around the world. The tool tracks the progression of the disease, the current status of medical capabilities, and reports on social behavior at city, county, state and country levels. It also provides automated commentary “in plain English” and allows users to animate the entire evolution of the pandemic.

To expand the project further, LexisNexis Risk Solutions joined forces with Florida Atlantic University (FAU), an organization with which it has collaborated and supported for more than a decade. In addition to advising on the development of the tool and helping to promote it in academic research journals, FAU helped develop a model for predicting the future spread of the virus based on several factors such as population density, demographics and seasonal tourism.  
 
“The speed, data, commentary and the user interface are phenomenal. Without the HPCC Systems platform, it would take hours to retrieve any of this information,” notes Dr. Borivoje Furht, Professor and Director of Computer Sciences at FAU.

To date, insights from the tracker have been featured in  three technical papers for the prestigious Big Data Journal, including insights into the deep learning involved in the solution and the success of predictive tools that used this deep model and big data analytics to predict healthcare outcomes. Importantly, the tracker is also available to anyone who would like see the up-to-the-minute status of the pandemic in a given location. “FAU and LexisNexis Risk Solutions did something no one else has done,” adds Furht. “With our modeling and The COVID-19 Tracker, we are able to predict outcomes with 90% accuracy.” The team recently began incorporating vaccination rates as it continues to refine the tool and hopes to incorporate other important data in the future.

Access the LexisNexis Risk Solutions COVID-19 Tracker at covid19.hpccsystems.com