>> from Seattle. Washington. It's the Q covering AWS. Imagine nonprofit brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Hey, welcome back already, Jeff. Rick here with the Cube were 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 the AWS. Imagine not for profit. Imagine of it. Great event. Little under 1000 people here talking about solving very, very, very big important problems in AWS is helping him. 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 not a happy problem. I wonder if you can speak a little bit too, You know, kind of the scale of this, this issue and, you know, I know that's part of the reason why you got involved. >> Yeah. You know, 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 to do this every day 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, you know, we we realized that the work that we do is very, very important. And, you know, 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 a it's great great for you to do it. So give us a little bit of background on the actual organization. What do you do every day? What kind of the mission and how are you >> executing around the world? >> Well, the mission, as 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 our 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. And for those of us who have children, there's a sense of panic when they're out of our sight for even a moment. Will. 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 that oftentimes lead toe very negative outcomes so way need to get on it quickly and to build. Um, this would be hard enough if we were just doing in the United States, but our organization was really built out of a necessary out of the necessity to build a global solution for this. So we've activated emergency response in over 30 countries, things like the 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 the 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 us about the scale of the problem, I mean, how how big do you think the missing >> children probably want? I don't even want to guess, right? I mean, it's, it's, uh, knows all kind of in everyone's face back in the in the milk carton >> days right, which we don't really get seats so much on the milk cartons in the back of trucks. But it's it's >> hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands. But to your point, if it's the one, if it's that that one is is every 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 It's a way of activating um, the communities through a alert system that is constantly searching for a child on there's there's lots of different ways that we do that, but just getting back to the point of the size of the problem. I mean, there's there's well over 400,000 children missing in the United States. It's enough. If 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, um, 80,000 children missing in the UK That's that's enough children that are missing to Philip Wembley Stadium, 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 you know what's kind of the ongoing, um, you know, kind of process to keep to keep those keep those faces alive and to use kind of >> modern methods to find them. Clearly, the milk carton was something that that was available a long >> time ago was kind of mass distribution kind of creative at the time. But I have a lot more tools at your disposal today. >> Yeah, you know what? One? One thing that is so important is just making sure a a country is ready and that that is an 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 on. And that's where things like facial recognition software come in. And, you know, we're big proponents of the partnership and advocacy that we have with a W S that allows us tow Dr that intelligence through our platform and will make it more possible to find more children. >> Right. So you say you're relatively new to the organization. Was there a specific charge in your mind in terms of, you know, kind of fresh blood, fresh energy, fresh point of view that you saw on this opportunity or they saw in you that was kind of York and a new strategic directive that maybe a little bit different than what was happening before, only >> as your new Yeah. Meanwhile, while this is all 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. If things have come back rather full circle in this new pursuit, by the way, missing children isn't isn't all that we D'oh. But my, uh, my day job over the last 15 years was really ah was organizational transformation. It was it was helping organ organization standardize and scale, um, so that they could be more productive. They can leverage technology so that they can engage a workforce thio drive the right behaviors, Did 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, you know, 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 understanding where 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 even 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 foundational e to us being able to understand where countries that trying to go in and provide a cookie cutter solution doesn't work when you're talking about international work, the sensitivities of ah, of a country's culture and understanding of how law enforcement how the education system, how the political system hell 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, we're looking to do right now is to take these silos that we've been focusing on for nearly 20 years where we've been where we've trained, you know, tens of thousands of law enforcement professionals, educators and health care nationals. 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 gonna 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 that 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 in two. How they get there and how they stay there. And there will be a commitment, ongoing support from us to be able to, you know, keep them moving in the right direction. That's really the vision for the organization. >> Yeah, a CZ you're talking, you know, it's going through my mind is is is the surveillance >> society that we live in right We've got cameras everywhere as you talk to. You know, we're talking about the milk carton, So I'm thinking about pictures of these of these kids rights. 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 just, you know, are >> these are these tools that you currently use that you envision using? I mean, I would would you know, there's always the privacy security, >> you know, kind of trade off and complexity. That said, I would imagine tools like surveillance at airports and tools like facial recognition and tools like a I and machine learning to do projected aging of individuals must be tremendous new assets for you guys to leverage in your mission. >> Yeah, they've been around for a while, but it's getting better and better, and I know the downward pressure that effects organizations like a W s relative to facial recognition. There's so many privacy laws that cause this this'll challenge for organizations like AWS and also organizations like ours. I guess where where I'm at with it all is we need, there's 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 country to country, right. But these are the tools that we need that are gonna be just absolutely vital to finding more children to protecting more children, whether these air children that are being trafficked in an airport or child that goes missing after two hours. And we need toe alert a community and feed their images into our system that constantly searches for them. Whether it's in the first hour or just spoke to a parent who had been on his 45th day of his missing son, his son had gone missing. And and 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 toe, employ technology that never stops. I mean, that's you talked about how dark of, ah of a of a job this could be, Yeah, but you know, the hope that we provide really is is the light that keeps us going >> right. So, Paul, final question. What do people not >> know about the space that they should? If you if you could just say, you know, this is kind of the reality, but, >> you know, this is this is where I'm very careful, Thio to make sure that people are ready to hear the realities of the space. I spoke to a judge in the Philippines recently who talked about just the, you know, 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? What exactly are we talking about here? And 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 know, you talk about something that drives you when you find out children that are that vulnerable in the scale that truly exists, the numbers that exist. You wake up every day 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 an entertainment. I don't care if it's in technology. I don't care if it's 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 it's why I feel so fortunate to be here. Um, at this a w s conference, learning more about how we can employ even more technology to make us strong, >> right? Well, certainly with a w s behind you got all the technology >> could ever, ever hope Thio deploy. So hopefully that will help >> you be more effective in your work and >> your team's work. And thank you for taking a few minutes. >> You got Jeff. Thank you so much. >> All right, thanks. He's Paul on Jeff. You're watching the cube. Where? Need of us. Imagined nonprofit in Seattle. Thanks >> for watching. See you next time