July 2005

This month I just work, and now the vacation period starts. I had several things to finish. The nicest thing is I can go the International Association of Forensic Science www.iafs2005.com meeting from 20-26 August in Hong Kong. I will give a presentation at a workshop and a scientific paper on biometric devices in the digital evidence session.

The other things I have to finish are abstracts for the AAFS www.aafs.org meeting next year in Seattle. The deadline is August 1st. I was planning to submit a workshop on Video and Image Investigation with the same team as last year. Furthermore a paper on Formats and CODECS, Biometric Devices and perhaps a paper on image processing of fingerprints. As chairman of the Engineering Sciences section I also have to write a contribution to the newsletter before August 1st.

This month I also had some casework, which was mostly routine. The worst thing I had was with the audit reports on a European Network of Excellence project FIDIS. Although I like doing the work in the project, this did not work out with the accountants. Our accountants are very afraid to give an audit report since cases as Enron etc, and that means that they will look after any small detail, and for a relatively small sum, 10 percent of the cost and work is in the meantime audit costs. They still refuse to give such a report, and are on vacation untill September (which is of course to late for the European Commission). That is the dark side of these projects, they cost lots of bureaucracy and the creativity and enthousiasm is lost for the work if it works like this. This is also true for many other project management models, such as Prince 2. This month I had so many reports with lots of text, that it was not easy to find how the project is working out. Although there are good things in them, I prefer to keep reporting simple and transparant, and that does not work out with the implementations that I have seen with these models.

I am looking forward to our conference that we organize in Amsterdam on ENFSI/IOCE/FIDIS. More information is available at http://www.enfsi.org .

June 2005 -2

The summer vacation for many colleagues has begun. That is the time that I have some time for writing, finishing articles and publications. We are currently just testing the biometric devices, and also some claims of the manufacturers. For example with the vein pattern detection methods. This week we were freightened how easy veins could be imitated with very simple equipment at our laboratory. Just a pen and paper will do the trick. More information will follow in the FIDIS report.

The social acceptance of fingerprints in biometric systems is rapidly improving. Of course the fingerprint can be spoofed, however it can be useful in various applications. It is also for convenience. For instance with the credit card banks and customers accept that data can be copied and lost easily, since there is trust in the system. When developing and implementing such systems the user and manufacturer should be aware of the risk of theft of information. Of course at one side people with claim if you have nothing to hide, you can share all your information, however at the other side is that databases can be used later on (maybe in 20 years), when many rules, laws and or governemnts have been changed, which makes is inpredictable what happens with this data.

This month I also changed my web provider, and migrated all the data. The advantage is more storage, bandwith and scripting possibilities against lower costs ! This week I also received permission for the IAFS in Hong Kong www.iafs2005.org .