Living near sea

December 2007

December was a busy month since we moved to near the sea from Amsterdam. It is more fresh air, and the view is beautiful. Also some casework had to be finished, however now I finished all casework I had to do this year.

As always many new plans for 2008. The AAFS www.aafs.org in Washington DC which is held in February should be prepared. I have the three presentations ready now. It will be a turbulent year with many changes, as far as I can see now.

November 2007

Last week I had to do an internal recertification for the NFI to sign reports. I had to defend eight reports for a committee with one external expert from the Forensic Science Service in the UK. Since all my reports in Dutch they are translated in English, which takes lots of time before the quality of translation is good enough.

I learned my lessons in the past, and did prepare this meeting in a proper way. I had all the files available, and it is also good to see if the files in archive are correctly, and they where ! I finally passed this exam with good resuls and now I am qualified for another four years unless of course there is a decision from the director or perhaps a change of law. It is good, however too much bureaucracy is involved in my opinion.

Now we are thinking on a new deliverable for FIDIS on camera and person identification. I hope to present some of this in the meeting on Monday.

October 2007

This month I started with the FIDIS workshop which appeared to be succesful. Also new ideas for new deliverables, however it is always a question of time if this will succeed. Before I went on vacation I had to finish several cases and write reports since it is important to deliver in the requested time for the trials. So before vacation it is as always busy, finishing some tasks.

Currently three students are working on improving our face comparison tool which is available from www.sourceforge.net face2face and NFI comparator. I am testing the results right now. Furthermore the research on pixel artefacts or Photo Response Non Uniformity of CMOS and CCD sensors appears to have better results then expected.

The vacation is to Turkey and Greece, and it is really nice. We went to İzmır, Van and to Chios and Lesvos. Van was not as touristic anymore, however the lake is beautiful.

September 2007

September is a busy month as always. This month I am looking forward to the ENFSI www.enfsi.eu Forensic IT working group meeting in Dublin, where I am the chairman of. We just migrated our information to the new website www.enfsimembers.eu . It is always more work then expected, and of course one needs to get used to new user interfaces.

On the 1st October we will organize an event on forensic profiling for www.fidis.net . This was expected for a long time, however now it will work out, since now we have many contributors ranging from the University of Lausanne, to the London School of Economics, University of Leuven and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Forensic profiling as such is a broad topic. However it means for us finding links between evidence by means of searching and linking databases of information. The different aspects from technological to privacy aspects will be handled in this deliverable.

The R&D projects are currently working out well also with a student. On pixel artefacts in cameras we did some new research with a database of cameras. It is nice to see the results, and I hope some if this will be presented at the AAFS in Washington DC.

The projects that I work on for forensic face comparison (comparator and face2face), and defraser for analysis of formats and codecs are now available on www.sourceforge.net . A group of students will work on the software to merge these projects.

Also busy with casework, and for October we have an internal audit where I have to defend eight reports for a committee. This procedure is a kind of internal certification, however it also means work in preparation.

August 2007

August is a month that many colleagues are on vacation. It is a good month to do some planning, an making new ideas. At the lab, there are some fewer cases, and in some way it is also good to finish reports, and making a good start for the next months to come when it is busy.

Preparing meetings for FIDIS www.fidis.net on forensic profiling, ENFSI www.enfsi.org Forensic IT working group.

Also with MRI scans I wrote on before and the interpretation of them, it appears that different radiologist make different conclusions. It is interesting to see that there is no golden standard on these things yet.

July 2007

At the beginning of this month I was the whole week in Brussels for the European Commission. It is always nice to be in Brussels. This week we also have to finish some casework. For a reconstruction at night we have to be late at a place where a crime had happened to have the proper lighting and do a proper reconstruction.

I will have surgery to my wrist later on this week (caused by the catheterisation through my wrist in the hospital which probably damaged the vein and one of the nerves and caused that I have a bumb on it and difficulties with using my hand), so for two weeks I am not able to write that much. It is summer time, so it is time to read, make new proposals, evaluate and finishing the casework. So I also have to be quick for the proposals for the AAFS meeting, since they have to be in before August 1st 2007.

June 2007

Before the summer vacation many things should be finished. This time we did a court training (defending an expert report) before an audience, and it appeared to be good. Some sharp questions were asked, and it always helps to improve the quality. A new student are starting their projects now (camera identification), and several students are finishing their projects (software development, literature overview of vein scanners and their reliability).

May 2007 (2)

We had many holidays this month, however also time to finish some casework. Even a presentation in Brussels last week on biometrics was nice to give http://www.intertechusa.com/conferences/conferenceDetail.aspx?displayDetail=overview&WCID=198 . I was the last speaker of the conference, and still there were many nice questions to answer. The whole range from DNA databases and exchange of information on these to the spoofing of fingerprints, irises and the current implementation of the biometric devices were discussed.

May 2007

April was a nice month. It is always good to go with colleagues to have a drink, and discuss new developments and of course much more as can be seen in the photograph. This month I had to do several cases, and do some investigation with a reconstruction at an ATM, to have good images for comparison of faces. It is difficult to have a similar positioning and the same condition, so each time we are improving this method. Since many wireless options exist, we can use them to make more efficient.

The steering committee of ENFSI was this year in Belfast. It was a nice event, and I enjoyed the city also a lot. The city improves each time that I am there (and also gets more expensive;) We discussed the meeting in Dublin, and had some nice ideas, and of course discussed proficiency tests. More information on the working group is available on www.enfsi.org .

And on the 30th of april (Queens day in the Netherlands) I will give a presentation for FIDIS on biometric devices in forensic science in Parague, and a kind of overview how biometrics is used in forensic science. It is always good to have some time, to update these presentations.

The website is also updated in some form. I also see that the forens-l list http://geradts.com/mailman/listinfo/forens_geradts.com which is hosted there runs again.

Last week I planned several meetings for our R&D-projects, in order to have an update. The software for analysis and repair of AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and 3GP streams that has been developed in the lab, will be open sourced on sourceforge in June. If possible, we try to open source it, so others can also implement their plugins and of course anyone can review the software.

Colleagues

April 2007

Amsterdam central station

I am just using my new phone K800i where I have UMTS and can directly post on this blog and made a photograph out from the window of our appartement in Amsterdam. It seems to be convenient, however for me it was also important that the phone has a radio on it. Today I had a phone conference with this new phone, and tested VOIP over UMTS. It did work, however it appeared that I had some latency issues.

As always enjoying new things. Yesterday some casework and a reconstruction at night, since we had to have similar conditions. This week it was somewhat more quiet due to Eastern, so a good time to think on old projects that should have been finished, and look how to have some new projects and possibilities.

March 2007

The AAFS www.aafs.org was a very interesting conference in which progress has been made to form a digital evidence and multimedia section. After this conference I didn't have much time, due to backlogs. We had to write new and modified project proposals, do casework, give advise, and had several visitors.

Furthermore I went to Damascus for one week. It was a nice and relaxed vacation. We rented a car and visited many nice sites and visited very good restaurants. Our hotel was in the mountains around Damascus, and it was a good time to relax.

Currently I am sitting at the FIDIS www.fidis.net general meeting. Many interesting talks on identity related issues. As leader of WP 6, it appears we had some trouble with delivering the deliverable on time. The issue is that it was difficult to find a forensic profiler with the necessary clearance on time. Suddenly we are working on a solution by cooperating with the University of Lausanne, and I have a good feeling that this deliverable will be finished in 2006. The nice part of FIDIS is that it is more multi-disciplinary, so I get more insights in different perspectives.

February 2007

I am looking forward to the AAFS meeting in San Antonio this month. This time, I organize a workshop, give two papers, and even receive an award. I like the good atmosphere of the AAFS, the interesting people to meet, and some good discussions about forensic science. It is 8 hours flying at least, so I will stay one day longer to get used to the time difference.

Currently I am preparing the presentations. However it appears that this time my planning and scheduling is better than before. I got it ready last week, and everything was in time. Also my casework has been in time. We are also doing software project with students, and I am looking what will happen with these. Also as chairperson of the employees representatives, I had several meeting, and since our director will change, we have some interesting times. Also the organization is expanding now, so it looks very optimistic.