No Place Like Home: Pet Reunification After Disaster

Pets are important household members, and their welfare and safety are imperative to the emotional welfare of the family. Displacement of pets after disaster events is a serious matter to families and for public safety at large. People are not willing to evacuate without their non-human family members; many will break through evacuation zones to recover animals left behind. In the 2005 Hurricane Katrina event, over 200,000 pets were displaced, and 95% of them were never reunited with their families. The US Department of Agriculture confirms that the problem of reuniting displaced pets and their guardians at this scale is unfortunately common in disaster events. We introduce No Place Like Home, a socially networked web and mobile platform that facilitates reunification of nonhuman with human family members following disaster events. No Place Like Home is an effort that supports the formation of small cadres of micro-tasking “digital volunteers” that converge after disasters to do photoand description-matching; employs a reputation and reward system to encourage use; and uses matchbased machine learning techniques to accelerate the manual matching tasks performed by digital volunteers.