Lost & found mobile app for universities

Abstract

An average person loses more than 3,000 possessions in their lifetime – these include daily items such as stationary and personal items. In Singapore, an average of 86 reports of items were made to Found and Unclaimed Property Office branch of the Singapore Police Force and it is still rising yearly. Officers in Found and Unclaimed Property Office must sift through 40 items and only up to 60 per cent of the reports are resolved daily. It will be much efficient if there is some sort of community effort in assisting the police in identifying and sifting through myriads of information to identify the owners.

Crowdsourcing have been very popular in recent years due to the advances of internet technologies as information can be spread fast and widely across the world. It introduces platform such as Kickstarter, GoFundMe which utilized crowdsourcing as a mean to obtain funds.

Also due to the emerging and rapidly developed Internet infrastructure, data are more readily available in the public domain. Data can be collected from these public domains and analysed for more related information, such that it can help understand something more clearly. The process is also known as Open-source intelligence.

This project aimed to utilized Open-source intelligence to help process and analyse data collected from the public through crowdsourcing, in order to provide an avenue for people to make reports of item and to notify potential owner.