As part of the STEM Festival this week Mr Bradley, Head of Computer Science, gave a lecture on the future of missing person search in the UK.
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Mr Bradley tells the story;
“A few days before Mr Dalton was asking for talks for the STEM Festival I had been running a desktop exercise for Berkshire Lowland Search and Rescue (BLSAR) – the local Lowland Rescue team I volunteer with. The exercise was running Search Planners and Search Operations Officers through the process of planning a vulnerable missing person search.
BLSAR is called upon by Thames Valley Police to assist in searching for vulnerable missing persons in the county. They might be vulnerable because of their age (small children), or their mental health (dementia or suicidal), or it might just be deemed out of character (and the police may be concerned a crime has happened to that person).
As I explained in the lecture, the Search Planners/Ops take a look at statistics that exist that give us some idea about what similar people in the past have done in these situations. They use these statistics to predict the likelihood that the missing person is in certain areas.
The aim of the search is to find the missing person as quickly as possible so there are algorithms that exist that allow the Search Management Team to allocate search effort into these areas in such a way as to maximise the Probability of Success (and hopefully finding the missing person alive before they succumb to the elements!)
During the exercise the Unit Lead, Kris Manning FInSTR, a search volunteer with 40 years experience and a global Network Engineer/Manager in his day job, asked the question – “how long do you think it will be before AI does all this search planning for us?”
To which I replied – it is one Phd student away, so five / seven years away.
As I presented in the lecture, we then discussed how drones could be automated to search for the missing person, using AI to analyse the imagery streamed back, and how the technology exists for autonomous quadrupeds to search areas too.
And this, hopefully, is the future technology that students of The Abbey will be working on in the next few years at their universities. They could, quite literally, be helping to save lives with the skills learnt in their Mathematics and Computer Science lessons.”
BLSAR is a local charity and if you wish to find out more about what they do, do visit their website at www.berkshirerescue.org.uk