"Lisa Alert" scaled mapping services to search for people throughout Russia

2020: Scaling map services to find people across Russia

The Mail.ru Cloud Solutions (MCS) platform helped the Lisa Alert volunteer search and rescue squad scale mapping services to search for people throughout Russia. Thanks to this, regional volunteers will have more opportunities to effectively study the area, Mail.ru Cloud Solutions reported on August 28, 2020.

The Lisa Alert project uses digital technologies to work with maps and routes. Search teams receive sets of terrain plans specially developed by cartographers, while all participants in search and rescue operations receive navigators who record the path traveled by a volunteer. A large amount of map data about routes and search history is accumulated on the LA Track web resource, where after processing information, search hypotheses are automatically formed that use group coordinators to design search tactics.

To deploy the service in 2019, the resources of the cloud platform Mail.ru Cloud Solutions were used.

"Lisa Alert" is constantly developing: new volunteers from different regions are joining the movement, more and more people are turning for help. As of August 2020, up to 30 search events per day can be held simultaneously, in which up to 300 people participate. Therefore, the detachment decided to scale the capabilities of the LA Track service, which has proven itself in the Moscow division, throughout the country. To solve this problem, the MCS platform provided additional power - the number of virtual machines for processing data increased from 5 to 12.

With the support of Mail.ru Cloud Solutions, Lisa Alert's regional offices have for the first time been able to leverage mapping services that help reduce search time, a critical lifesaving resource. Cloud solutions made it possible to optimize work throughout Russia without increasing the staff of IT specialists. Partner resources will also be used to train a neural network that will automatically recognize missing people in images of hard-to-reach sites taken by quadrocopters. A crowdsourcing platform helps to form a base for the neural network, on which volunteers manually mark the missing.