>> Narrator: From Seattle, Washington,
it's theCUBE covering AWS Imagine Nonprofit.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services.
>> Hey, welcome back everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We're in Seattle, Washington right on the waterfront.
It's a beautiful day.
Unfortunately, a lot of the topics
we're talking about today are not so beautiful.
We're here at AWS Imagine Not-for-Profit Imagine event.
Great event, little under 1,000 people here
talking about solving very, very, very, big
important problems, and AWS is helping them.
We're excited to have our next guest on.
He is Paul Shapiro, president and CEO
of the International Center for Missing
and Exploited Children.
Paul great to see you.
>> Hey, Jeff, thanks for having me.
>> I mean the title of your organization
says that this is not a happy problem.
I wonder if you can speak a little bit
to kind of the scale of this issue,
and I know that's part of the reason why you got involved.
>> It's interesting.
Someone once said to me,
"how do you do this for a living every single day?"
And this person put it into perspective, I think,
in a profound way.
It's a woman who works on our team
in the education space.
She works with teachers all over the world
to help them in the prevention and response
of sexually abused and exploited children, right?
And she said, "to be in this job and to so this everyday,
"you give up a little bit of your own innocence
"to preserve the innocence of others."
And when she said that to me,
it really hit home and while it can be
challenging every single day,
we realize that the work that we do is very very important.
And someone has to be there for these children
that are very much alone,
and that's what drives us every single day.
>> Very much God's work and it's great for you to do it.
So, give us little bit of background
on the actual organization.
What do you do every day?
What's kind of the mission?
And how are you executing around the world?
>> Well, the mission as we like to say,
is summarized up in just a few words, and that is:
no child stands alone.
And when you think about the children that are out there
and the children that we typically focus on
are first, missing children.
And why do we focus on missing children?
Because when a child goes missing,
they become extremely vulnerable.
And the urgency to find them quickly
is extraordinarily important.
The kind of things that can happen to them
when they're alone,
for those of us who have children,
there's a sense of panic when they're
out of our sight for even a moment.
Well you can imagine what happens when a child
actually goes missing for a period of time.
It's so very important to find them quickly
within the first few hours.
If not, they're vulnerable,
and they're vulnerable to things like trafficking,
to things like sexual abuse.
Things that oftentimes lead to very negative outcomes.
So, we need to get on it quickly and to build.
This would be hard enough if we were just doing it
in the United States,
but our organization was really built
out of a necessity to build a global solution for this.
So, we've activated emergency response
in over 30 countries.
Things like, you've heard of Amber Alerts
in the United States.
Well, we've helped activate those in over 30 countries.
We've helped with building a technology platform
that takes images of children
and allows us to geo-target those images
in countries all over the world
with just a push of the button,
sending out millions of images through
redundant advertising space,
through our technology partners
that allows for that to happen and a lot more.
So, when you think about,
you asked about the scale of the problem.
I mean, how big do you think
the missing children problem is?
>> I don't even want to guess, right?
I mean, it's all kind of in everyone's face
back in the milk carton days, right?
Which we don't really, I guess, see so much
on the milk cartons or the back of trucks,
but it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands.
But to your point, if it's a one,
if that one is, you know, that one is as important
as the other hundreds and hundreds of thousands.
>> I guess what we do is a modern day milk carton, right?
It's a way of activating the communities
through a alert system that is constantly
searching for a child.
And there's lots of different ways we that we do that.
But just getting back to the point
of the size of the problem,
I mean, there's well over 400,000 children
missing in the United States.
And it's enough.
I think 424,000 I believe is the number in the U.S. alone.
That's enough.
That's, what is that, the population of Miami.
>> Too many. >> Right.
There's 80,000 children missing in the U.K.
That's enough children that are missing
to fill up Wembley stadium. >> Right.
>> Australia, 24,000 children are missing, right?
>> So clearly most of those kids
didn't get picked up within hours
of becoming missing as you said
which is such an important piece.
So, what's kind of the ongoing,
kind of process to keep those faces alive
and to use kind of modern methods to find them?
Clearly the milk carton was something
that was available a long time ago.
It was kind of mass distribution, kind of creative at the time,
but you have a lot more tools at your disposal today.
>> Yeah, one thing that is so important
is just making sure a country is ready,
and that, that isn't easy work.
That means finding partners that are out there
that want to make a difference in this area.
Law enforcement is a huge piece of this.
Other NGOs are a huge piece of this
and of course technology
with the help of organizations like Amazon
really enable us to be able to do that.
And that's where things like
facial recognition software come in.
And we're big proponents of the partnership
and advocacy we have with AWS that allows us
to drive that intelligence through our platform
and will make it more possible to find more children.
>> So you said you're relatively new to the organization,
was there a specific charge in your mind
in terms of kind of fresh blood, fresh energy,
fresh point of view
that you saw in this opportunity or they saw in you
that's kind of your kind of new strategic directive
that maybe is a little bit different
than what was happening before
only because you're new. >> Yeah.
Yeah, I mean while this has always been so important to me,
You know, finding a way to give back
and make the world a better place.
I mean that is something that has driven me
my entire career, and you know ironically,
17 years ago I worked for a company
that really took on missing children
as the purpose of their organization.
So that's when I got my first exposure to this.
So things have come back rather full circle
in this new pursuit.
By the way, missing children isn't all that we do.
But my day job over the last 15 years was really,
It was organizational transformation.
It was helping organizations standardize in scale
so that they could be more productive,
so that they could leverage technology.
So that they can engage a workforce
to drive the right behaviors.
Get a lot of organizational training.
Trained tens of thousands of individuals
over the last 15 or so years.
And when I had an opportunity to come to this organization,
I really saw an extraordinary team of people
that were very effective at training countries.
This organization is a very sensitive organization.
What I mean by that is they're very sensitive
to understanding where a country is
in its readiness for child protection.
And we go in the countries with that sensibility
and make sure that the programs that we build
first, that there is policy and legislation in place
so that the country event recognizes that there's
a problem, and by the way, we've driven.
We've driven policy and legislation
where we've had significant influence
in over 150 countries over the last 20 years
which is extraordinary work.
That's very important foundationally
to us being able to understand where a country's at.
Trying to go in and provide a cookie cutter solution
doesn't work when you're talking about international work.
The sensitivities of a country's culture,
an understanding of how law enforcement,
how the education system,
how the political system,
how healthcare views this problem,
is ready for this problem, is really what we focus on.
So, that's really where we've built our core competencies.
Are in those very areas,
and what, along with my team and I,
were looking do right now is to take these silos
that we've been focusing on for nearly 20 years
where we've trained tens of thousands
of law enforcement professionals, educators,
and healthcare professionals,
and we're taking that to the next level.
We're building it into a global training academy
that is going to take a multidisciplinary look at this,
that brings these teams together,
and instead of us just going in with instructor-led
training which is what so many organizations do,
we're going to be taking a look at a blended learning
curriculum using technology to take it online
where we can.
And to make sure that the time we spend in these countries
is really focused on helping these countries
get to a level of certification
where they are international center certified.
And there will be accountability and expectations
built into how they get there and how they stay there.
And there will be a commitment to ongoing support
from us, to be able to keep them
moving in the right direction.
That's really the vision for the organization.
>> I can't-- >> Does that make sense?
>> Yeah, but as you're talking.
What's going through my mind is the surveillance society
that we live in, right?
We've got cameras everywhere.
We're talking about the milk cartons,
so I'm thinking about pictures
of these kids, right?
So we've got surveillance everywhere.
We've got all types of laws around
how that surveillance is used.
We've got facial recognition software
all over the place now which is developing.
And I'm just, are these tools that you currently use,
that you envisioned using?
I mean I would, you know, there's always
the privacy, security, kind of trade-off and complexity.
That said, I would imagine tools like
surveillance at airports and tools like facial recognition
and tools like AI and machine-learning
to projected aging of individuals
must be a tremendous new assets for you guys
to leverage in your mission.
>> Yeah, they've been around for a while,
but they're getting better and better.
And I know the downward pressure
that affects organizations like AWS
relative to facial recognition.
There's so many privacy laws that cause
this challenge for organizations like AWS
and also organizations like ours.
I guess where I'm at with it all is:
we need them. >> Right.
>> There's not a question about privacy,
in my mind, when it comes to protecting children.
It's the one great unifier that we have,
so we need to find ways to work
within the confines of privacy.
And that varies wildly from country to country, right?
But these are the tools that we need
that are going to be just absolutely vital
to finding more children, to protecting more children.
Whether these are children that are being trafficked
in an airport or child that goes missing
after two hours, and we need to alert a community.
And feed their images into our system
that constantly searches for them.
Whether it's in the first hour,
or I just spoke to a parent who had been
on his 45th day of his missing son.
His son had gone missing,
and you see the desperation that a parent has
when they have nowhere else to turn.
It's our job to find places for them to turn,
to employ technology that never stops.
I mean that's, you talked about how dark
of a job this could be.
Yeah, but the hope that we provide
really is the light that keeps us going.
>> Right, so Paul, final question:
what do people not know about this space that they should?
If you could just say, you know, this is kind of the reality.
What should they know? >> You know this is where
I'm very careful
to make sure that people are ready to hear
the realities of this space.
I spoke to a judge in the Philippines recently
who talked about just the kind of cases
that she's trying when it comes to sexual abuse,
when it comes to children who are trafficked,
and I said, "what exactly are we talking about here?"
By the way this is a conversation
I'll have with a lot of people,
especially in law enforcement.
You know, what kind of age are we talking about?
You'd be shocked to find out
how high the percentage of children are under 10 years old.
You'd be shocked to find out
the percentage of children that are under one.
And you say to yourself, "how can this be?"
Well, it is.
It is the reality of what we're dealing with,
so you talk about something that drives you?
When you find out children that are that vulnerable
in this scale that truly exists, the numbers that exist,
you wake up everyday and you run to this job
and you try to find partners out there
in every sector that you can.
I don't care if it's in sports.
I don't care if it's in entertainment.
I don't care if it's in technology.
I don't care if it'd in religion or government.
You find partners that have the ability
to make you stronger, and that's a big part of our remit.
And it's why I feel so fortunate to be here
at this AWS conference learning more about
how we can employ even more technology to make us stronger.
>> Well, certainly with AWS behind you,
you've got all the technology you could ever,
ever hope to deploy, so hopefully that will help you
be more effective in your work, in your team's work.
And thank you for taking a few minutes.
>> Yeah, you got it, Jeff.
Thank you so much. >> All right.
>> So nice to meet you. >> Pleasure, all right thanks.
He's Paul. I'm Jeff.
You're watching theCUBE.
We're at AWS Imagine Nonprofit in Seattle.
Thanks for watching.
See you next time.
(light techno music)