 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 the AWS Imagine, not for profit, Imagine event, great event, little under a thousand people here talking about solving very, very, very big important problems in 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. Yeah, 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 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, 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, great for you to do it. Give us a 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 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. 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 it 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 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, 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 of the back of trucks. But it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands. But to your point, if it's the one, if 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 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 that's enough. I think it's 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 UK. That's enough children that are missing to fill up 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 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 have a lot more tools at your disposal today. Yeah, you know, one thing that is so important is just making sure a country is ready. And 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. 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 AWS that allows us to drive that intelligence through our platform and we'll 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 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, I mean, while this has always been so important to me, 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 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 and scale so that they could be more productive, so that they can leverage technology so that they can engage a workforce to 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, 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 even recognizes that there's a problem. And by the way, 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 and 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, 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 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 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 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. Okay, does that make sense? Yeah, but as you're talking, it's going through my mind is the surveillance society that we live in, right? We've got cameras everywhere. As you talked to, we're talking about the milk carton. 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. Are these tools that you currently use, that you envision using? I mean, 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 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 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. 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 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 a 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, you talked about how dark of a job this can be. Yeah, but the hope that we provide really is the light that keeps us going. So Paul, final question. What do people not know about the space that they should? If you could just say, you know, this is kind of the reality, what should they do? You know, this is where I'm very careful 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 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? 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 know, 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 in 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 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. Right. Well, certainly with AWS behind you, you've got all the technology you could ever, ever hope to, to 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. Yeah, you got it, Jeff. Thank you so much. So nice to meet you. 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.