February 2009 (2)

The http://www.aafs.org/ meeting in Denver was excellent, and our new section Digital and Multimedia sciences has started the first year. I am happy that the members re-elected me as chairperson for another year, so we can build further on the new section. Also the workshop was visited well, and there were many good papers. During the meeting, also the NAS-report was published http://www.nas.edu/morenews/20090218.html that the forensic science field is fragmented, and there is need to have more scientific research established in this field, as well as coordination. So, it would be excellent if good actions are made to improve these findings, since many of them are also true in the rest of the world.



It would be nice if this would result in a more research and also more statistics on methods used in forensic science. Of course, many forensic scientists are aware of the issues, however the question is if the court is aware of the limitations that can exist in a forensic report or testimony. There are several efforts made to have a more scientific way of reporting, for example with Bayesian rules and likelihood ratios. The difficult part in these is that the reporting gets more complicated, and the question is if the reader of the reports understands these conclusions. However in these cases it is important to mention that often a subjective scale is used. See for example http://www.intermin.fi/intermin/images.nsf/files/6C8438A4F3468012C2256D0A00284C02/$file/IBSTE2002_Vol8_3.pdf .

Furthermore we just published our new PRNU comparison for www.fidis.net on https://sourceforge.net/projects/prnucompare/ for camera comparison and the enf collector for collecting variations in the electricity signal https://sourceforge.net/projects/nfienfcollector/.