On December 6, 2021, Sun Haiyang, the real-life prototype of the protagonist in the movie Dearest, finally found his long-lost son Sun Zhuo. This reunion spanned 14 years. In front of the camera, Sun Haiyang held his son Sun Zhuo tightly and wept bitterly, silently expressing his longing and hardships over the past 14 years.
Behind this reunion lies the support of the AI Baby team from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The team used AI image restoration technology to help the Sun Haiyang family accurately restore relevant images and videos of the involved personnel, bringing a successful end to this 14-year journey of searching for a missing family member. Over four years, the AI Baby team has continuously helped multiple families retrieve their lost children. As more missing children are found, the team’s entrepreneurial path of "AI + public welfare" has gradually become clear, while also providing a new practical approach for the development of social public welfare undertakings.
01 Gathering Social Synergy with Public Welfare at the Core, Illuminating the Journey of Finding Relatives with Technology
In 2020, Sheng Jianzhong, a doctoral student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, noticed while watching a TV program about finding missing relatives that the photos shown were blurry, which made it more difficult to locate the missing children. Coincidentally, Sheng Jianzhong’s research focus is digital image processing, and this observation sparked his innovative inspiration.
Sheng Jianzhong first focused on algorithm research and development, attempting to create an AI algorithm capable of automatically restoring blurry images. However, developing such an efficient AI system requires extensive training and optimization of the algorithm. At that time, Sheng Jianzhong was working alone; there was a lack of available data resources in China, and all data had to be manually annotated by himself. Manual annotation is tedious and inefficient, so Sheng Jianzhong gathered several classmates from Huazhong University of Science and Technology to annotate the data together, forming the initial prototype of the AI Baby team. After nearly half a year of unremitting efforts, the team finally completed the optimization of the model in August 2020. Eventually, photos restored by the AI model saw a significant improvement in clarity and detail reproduction.
After successfully developing the image restoration algorithm, Sheng Jianzhong’s team took the initiative to contact public welfare organizations, hoping to contribute technological strength to the cause of finding missing relatives. The organizations provided a batch of blurry, long-backlogged missing-person photos for the team to restore. After a period of hard work, the team successfully restored these photos—originally only a few dozen kilobytes in size—to over 150 megabytes, greatly improving the clarity of the missing-person photos. This achievement also helped the team gain the trust of public welfare organizations, and they eventually signed a strategic cooperation agreement to provide free photo restoration services for the organizations on a targeted basis.
Up to now, Sheng Jianzhong’s team has provided free restoration services for photos of more than 1,000 missing children across the country, and successfully helped retrieve 17 of them. Among the successful cases, after the restored photos are handed over to the public security organs and the relatives, the missing children are usually found within an average of 6 months, which has greatly improved the efficiency and success rate of finding missing relatives. Moreover, the AI Baby team has innovatively proposed a "technological search + social search" model. The team not only restores photos for those searching for relatives free of charge but also hands over the processed photos to public security organs, public welfare organizations, and caring enterprises for collaborative search efforts. These restored missing-person photos are attached to their products in the form of "missing-person tapes" or displayed at the end of TV programs, further integrating social resources to form a joint social force and enhancing the efficiency and success rate of finding missing relatives.
02 Integrating Capital Strength to Support Public Welfare, Setting Sail in Nanjing with Venture Capital Wind
In 2023, Sheng Jianzhong learned about the "Win in Nanjing" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition by chance. However, considering the disadvantage of participating as a non-local project, he hesitated for a while about whether to join. After carefully studying the competition rules, evaluation criteria, and Nanjing’s business environment, Sheng Jianzhong was deeply attracted by Nanjing’s fair, impartial, efficient, and pragmatic style in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. Eventually, he decided to take a chance and lead the team to participate in the "Win in Nanjing" competition. After several rounds of fierce competition, the AI Baby project successfully entered the finals and won an award with a top-ranking result. This participation also brought the Sheng Jianzhong team into contact with Nanjing Innovation Investment Group, laying the groundwork for the team’s subsequent development in Nanjing.
Nanjing Innovation Investment Group has always maintained a strong focus on technology-innovative start-ups and actively provides enabling services such as financial support and growth guidance for innovative and entrepreneurial enterprises. The AI Baby project’s innovative idea of integrating AI technology with public welfare and expanding the application of AI has attracted the attention of Nanjing Innovation Investment Group. After in-depth understanding and investigation, Nanjing Innovation Investment Group decided to invest in the project, helping it transform the technical accumulation of AI technology in image processing into more commercial application cases.
"The investment from Nanjing Innovation Investment Group has greatly boosted the team’s confidence, making us feel that the cause we are engaged in is recognized by society and the market. At the same time, it has also made our team start thinking about how to expand our business at the commercial level in the future, so as to achieve the long-term and sustainable development of the company while doing a good job in public welfare projects," said Sheng Jianzhong.
The mass entrepreneurship investment team of Nanjing Innovation Investment Group stated that the AI Baby project stood out from more than 3,000 participating projects and entered the finals, which itself is a strong proof of the team’s outstanding strength and the far-reaching value of the project. After in-depth understanding of the AI Baby project, the investment team is optimistic about the iteration direction of its AI image processing technology and its broad application prospects in different fields.
This mutual engagement between capital and innovative enterprises has also helped Nanjing’s AI industry welcome a "new member". The experience of participating in "Win in Nanjing" and the investment from Nanjing Innovation Investment Group have made Sheng Jianzhong feel the strong support Nanjing provides for innovative and entrepreneurial enterprises. As a result, Sheng Jianzhong has focused the team’s commercialization layout on Nanjing. The post-investment enabling services of Nanjing Innovation Investment Group have also continued accurately: "From capital injection to venue arrangement, from talent introduction to application for policy preferences, we will solve the practical needs of the enterprise in its development process one by one to help the enterprise achieve better development in Nanjing," said a relevant person from the mass entrepreneurship team of Nanjing Innovation Investment Group. In response to the AI Baby team’s vision of expanding commercial business, Nanjing Innovation Investment Group will actively play a bridging role, helping the team connect with various innovative resources and lay a solid foundation for the new stage.
Regarding the future commercial development direction of the company after settling in Nanjing, Sheng Jianzhong said that the company’s recent commercial goal is to provide customized products or services for various fields where AI restoration technology can be applied. At present, the AI Baby team has made some preliminary attempts in this field, reached a number of cooperations, and developed an APP based on the HarmonyOS architecture to prepare for the future expansion of commercial business in Nanjing.
03 Technological Innovation Empowering Public Welfare Reform, Humanistic Care Guiding Technology for Good
As one of the earliest teams in China to combine "AI" with "searching for missing relatives", Sheng Jianzhong’s team has successfully solved many technical problems and challenges through years of technical accumulation, accumulating rich experience and achievements in the field of image restoration. Currently, the AI model trained by the team can well meet the needs of high-definition image restoration. Sheng Jianzhong believes: "AI photo restoration can restore the original appearance of photos more objectively, completely eliminating the subjective factors of human intervention, so that the final presented photos can be as faithful as possible to the true appearance of the original images." At present, the company is continuously optimizing the algorithm and realizing the editing of local facial information, aiming to naturally and accurately restore the changes of human faces under different conditions to achieve better restoration results.
Currently, the trend of "AI + public welfare" is booming. The great advantages of AI in data analysis, predictive model construction, and intelligent decision-making have brought unprecedented accuracy and efficiency to public welfare projects. The development model of "AI + public welfare" not only improves the efficiency and quality of public welfare undertakings but also profoundly changes the operation mode and value orientation of public welfare undertakings. It enables public welfare projects to more accurately meet social needs and achieve the optimal allocation of resources. At the same time, the integration of technology also promotes the transparency and credibility of public welfare undertakings, enhancing public trust and support for public welfare. Furthermore, the in-depth integration of AI and public welfare will help attract more people to participate in public welfare undertakings in the future, jointly promoting social progress.
In an interview, Sheng Jianzhong said: "I believe that ‘AI + public welfare’ will be one of the important trends in social development in the future. With the gradual maturity of AI technology in recent years, we have seen more and more cases of AI applications in the commercial field, but the application of AI technology in the public welfare field is rarely seen. However, we believe that the public welfare field also needs innovation; technology needs to be applied to public welfare, and ultimately, technology should return to its essence of serving people and promoting social progress."
The essence of the continuous iteration of technology lies in the improvement of logical operations and data processing. However, the iteration of technology should not only focus on the pursuit of functionality but also respond to the needs of various industries and sectors of society, so as to solve social problems and create commercial value. As pioneers in the field of "AI + searching for missing relatives", Sheng Jianzhong and the AI Baby team have proven through practice that technology can go beyond cold code and become a bridge for conveying warmth and hope. The innovation and development of technology should always follow the people-oriented principle, and enterprises should pay attention to the social effects and humanistic value of technology. Only under such a guidance can technology truly become a powerful force for promoting social progress and benefiting mankind.
Text Source: Nanjing Innovation Investment Group
Image Source: Official WeChat Account of AI Baby Volunteer Service Team
Review: Xue Yao
Release: You Yi
