(upbeat pop music) >> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering South by Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Okay welcome back everyone. We are here live at South by Southwest at the Intel AI lounge. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, talking to some great guests. The theme for this week is AI for Social Good. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, our next guest is Federico Gomez Suarez, technical advisor and volunteer at Thorn, doing some really amazing things with technology for the betterment of society. Specifically a use case. So Federico, welcome to theCUBE, welcome to the AI Lounge here at Intel. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> So talk about Thorn. First of all, you work for Microsoft, but you're a volunteer? >> Correct. >> Talk about what Thorn is, and what you guys do. It's really a great story. >> So Thorn is a non-profit which focuses on driving technological innovation to fight child sexual exploitation. And it does it two ways. One of them is by doing research to find the new trends and the new ways that this is happening. But also by using the latest technology to find ways that we can actually fight this problem. Thorn has something called an innovation lab, where we're always trying new technology, we're trying AI just to find new ways to fight the problem. >> So this is really a great use case of where technology is being used for the betterment of society and good, because what you're doing is taking really cutting edge big data, machine learning, AI techniques. And the rage right now is facial recognition. >> Oh Yes! >> So talk about where and how it works. And what's the results? And can you share some of the impact? >> Yeah! So as part of my volunteer work, one of the projects that I have been working, is called a child finder service. And the idea of this work is, if we have an image, particularly an image of a child who have been missing, can we use facial recognition to determine whether another image is the same child. And this is actually a pretty challenging problem because the child may have gone missing many years back and now we want to match against another picture where the child may show much growth. >> Depending on the duration, right? >> And you know, if you imagine the impact of actually having this technology, a person who is trying to look for a missing child, if they have to go through a lot of pictures, it's actually hard to determine whether two people are the same person or not. So we're helping in that case. We're helping so that you don't have to go through so many pictures. So that we can highlight the ones that the machine thinks is actually the same person. >> Take us through how it works, in just a use case, just as an illustration. >> Yeah, So when a child goes missing, the National Center for Missing Children, which we work with, they publish a poster and that poster has an image of a missing child. Now once you have that image, you may want to say well are there places where the picture of that child may be showing up. One place that there's usually pictures of children being exploited are online ads. So let's say that there's online ads and you want to say, well in any of these ads that they use for exploitation, could there be the same child in both of them. So that's actually a use case. And just using face recognition technology, we can try to make the problem easier, faster than it would be if you were trying to do it manually. >> And you're doing a demo here in the Intel AI Lounge. What's in the demo? What are you showing? >> So in the demo, I'm showing how difficult it really is to do face recognition by hand. And how by just having some assistance from a machine, you can go from having to look at hundreds of images and spending potentially hours, to doing it seconds. >> So how to do you involved? I mean, this is a volunteer organization, take us through your journey. How did you get involved? And talk about how you guys are getting more people involved, and how can someone get involved? >> Absolutely! So, you know as for Microsoft, there is the Hack for Good community, and they encourage us to go and donate our time, our skill to non-profits. Two years ago, I had this idea, and I did a hackathon. And after the hackathon, I got connected with Thorn. I learn about what they do, and that's how I pretty much got involved. I was really fortunate that Microsoft supported me to actually go spend time with a non-profit. And when I start working with Thorn, I realized, hey there's other tech companies also willing to help. So in this child finder service project, I work with Intel, I work with other companies all coming together to find ways to solve this problem using the cutting edge technology available. And you know, Thorn is always looking for volunteers, we're looking for what we call our Tech Defenders. If you go to our website, which is wearethorn.org/Sxsw, you'll find the link where you can actually volunteer your skills as a technical defender for Thorn. >> So talk about, that's very cool by the way. People should check out Thorn. Is there a website, Thorn? >> Yeah, it's wearethorn.org/sxsw. >> Okay, wearethorn.org/sxsw. For South by Southwest. So talk about the technology, because obviously Intel makes chips, makes stuff go faster, you got more compute, you've got more cores, you got now, cloud technology. And you've seen at Google Next, where they were showcasing their Xeon processor, that the AI trend now is becoming really, really, really big. I know Microsoft as your Amazon web services. They're all having these machine learning libraries, and the big trend is self-learning machines or deep-learning. So this is a tech trend. But now when you apply it to this, it really can work. So, what is some of the technology, and what are some of the data sets that you use, how does it work under the covers? >> Yeah so, we actually start with an open source technology for face recognition. And after we started with this technology, we realized that we had to make it better. So we had to build data sets ourselves. For the data sets we have images of the posters that are published from the National Center. We have also started asking people to donate images over time, of themselves. Because we need images of people when they were children, and when they're older. And that's how we've been building data sets. And then having the data set, we need to go and train them. And that's where we're using hardware, in particularly using GPUs to actually do training is really is key for us. The technology really under this is deep learning for us. We used an existing deep-learning models, and improving them with our particular scenario, cause there's special challenges in our case. Not only with the age, but also a lot of the images that we process. Sometimes there's heavy makeup, sometimes there's things like that. >> Or res, resolution right? Depending on the photo? Right? >> Yeah. And you now, low resolution images particularly they're a challenge, so we need to improve it, we need to keep training to actually get to the point where we feel we have a really robust system. >> I want to ask you a personal question. And this is something we were talking about on our intro segment, and something that I've been thinking a lot about. I haven't written about it yet, but I've been starting to tease it out on some of my thought leader interviews. Is that, in every major inflection point in the business of technology, there's always been a counter-culture movement. And it seems to be that, if you look at all the news, whether it's political or tech company news, and all this stuff happening around the world, there seems to be a social good culture developing. We're seeing a counter-culture where what was once valued, tech or public proprietary algorithms, is now changing to open source, community, societal benefits. There seems to be a lot of activity, and no one's kind of put their finger on it. And you're a great use case of that example. >> And I feel like, the Hack for Good community in Microsoft is growing, and there's people, peers of mine, working on all this kind of interesting projects helping non-profits. >> And that's called Hack for Good? >> Yes. >> What's it called? >> Hack for Good in Microsoft. >> So that's a Microsoft hackathon with employees who just say, hey let's pick something good to do and they apply their programming technical skills to... >> Yeah, and you know there's a lot of support, and we're encouraged to do it. And it's to me inspiring to work in a company that really encourage that, and you know what? I see the same when I look across the industry. I see people willing to spend their evenings, like I spend my evenings working on some of this, or weekends, but we're passionate about making a difference. And I know I'm not alone. I've met a lot of people, and I know there's a lot more out there. >> Is there a community people can check out? Is it on the website? Is there open source community? Is there a certain software groups that are playing more than others? >> Actually I don't know. I know in my space, I think a I think a great place to start is joining Thorn's Digital Defenders. But I would say if someone is passionate about a cause, it could be anything, and say I want to help, there's non-profits out there for that. And when I work with non-profits, they're so passionate about it, and sometimes they just need help in little things. And having so many tech communities go in and help them makes a huge difference. I would invite people to just go. If you're passionate about it, just go for it. Find a non-profit, they'll be happy to work with you. >> Federico, I want to ask you if you could share just some anecdotal impact that you guys have had. Can you share some successes, some advances? Just highlight some of the things. >> Yeah, so Thorn just published their yearly report and it was really encouraging. So, Thorn has a couple of different tools that they build. One of them is called Spotlight. Through the use of this tool last year, about 2,000 children who were victims of trafficking, were recovered from around 6,000 victims. And you know, each victim is a person. And the fact that we're making a difference in those lives is extremely encouraging. And that's just one of the things that we were able to contribute. So that's one of the stories that we have. And to me it's not only that. To me, it's also the fact that I see people who are willing to actually get engaged, learn more about these problems is another huge win. >> Final question for you Federico. Describe the scene here at the AI Lounge at Intel. For folks watching who aren't at South by Southwest, what is the vibe here? What are they showing? Obviously AI is the theme. AI for Social Good is our broadcast here. Hashtag is #intelai, if you're interested in sharing, we'd appreciate if you could retweet and share the love. What's your thoughts on with the vibe here? Describe the scene here. >> You know, when I look around, all the demos are amazing. Like each one of them, you're blown away by it. And it just shows you how in a practical way, AI can be changing lives or doing amazing things. There's the drones there on the video. The drones, I love those, they look amazing. And then there's also the demo around using an art style and getting your picture. I'm going to get mine in a second. I think if you come by, you'll see how AI really in practice, is able to contribute to people's lives. And the vibe is awesome. And I'm loving it here. >> Well I want to say congratulations. You do amazing things. >> Thank you. >> It's really a real testament to where the society's going AI for Social Change. Microsoft has a Hackathon for Good, and this is not a one-off. I mean Microsoft certainly has had that. Google's got the 20% work on your own project. Intel has it. Companies are getting involved, a counter-culture is developing for societal benefits. And all these new things happening, like autonomous vehicles, smart cities, these are paradigm shifting society changes around the world and will require a human involvement. Congratulations, and thanks for sharing. >> Thank you very much. And we have a hashtag just for our product which is #defendhappiness. >> John: Defend happiness? >> Yeah, which is all about stopping sexual exploitation and trafficking all around the world. >> Okay, #defendhappiness. Please put it out there and share it, tweet this video. And for the betterment of society, I'm John Furrier with Federico here at the Intel AI Lounge. More coverage from South by Southwest. Three days of coverage, full day Cube today, some interviews tomorrow. Intel has some amazing super demos they're going to be showing here throughout the weekend. Stay tuned on theCUBE, we'll be covering it. We'll be right back with more, after this short break. 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