| | | Here's a story with a happy ending:
Little Boy Kidnapped 18 Years Ago Reunited with Family, Sparks Hope for Madeleine McCann
By Kayla Kunkel
Published July 22, 2019 at 4:29pm
After new developments in artificial intelligence helped solve an 18-year-old missing persons case in China, the search for Madeleine McCann has been given new hope.
On May 6, 2001, 3-year-old Yu Weifeng went to work with his father, Yu Zingquan, who was a foreman of a construction site in Southern China. While playing near the worksite, he disappeared.
Investigators from Shenzhen’s Futian District immediately began investigating the little boy’s disappearance, which they suspected to be an abduction but had no leads until over 18 years later.
“Technology was limited at the time,” Investigator Zheng Zhenai said, according to The Sun. “We checked surveillance footage, but there were simply too many people coming in and out of the area.”
But Tencent Holdings Limited, a large internet-based technology corporation, researches and provides Artificial Intelligence service through the Tencent AI Lab. According to their website, their goal is “both fundamental research and practical application of artificial intelligence.”
Because of Tencent AI Lab’s involvement, investigators were able to take an age-progressed photograph of the missing child and run it against almost 100 people on a database; it took about two months before the program identified Weifeng as a match.
The now-21-year-old student in Guangzhou didn’t believe that he had been kidnapped at first. |
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