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.