August 2009 (2)

This month I suddenly had to go to a court case in Amsterdam to testify. I had to wait from 2 to 6 pm in the court and witnessed a battle of experts. After that I could testify in the evening, and it gave me also strengthened me in the opinion that good validation, and testing different hypothesis is important in forensic science, together with clear interpretation and statistical evaluation in an understandable way for the court is needed. This was also one of the main issues within the NAS report of Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States.

Currently I am at the DFWRS- conference, and just gave a keynote talk on Opportunities and Challenges in Digital and Multimedia Sciences. It is an excellent conference where also the issue of having good validation based on ground thruth databases is discussed, and the issue of using software for analyzing forensic evidence with minimal standards is reproducible and reliable. The issue of the paradox of the zero-skill tools which are most optimal for wide use within police was also discussed. I also discussed our PRNU-tool with the new version where more batch processing is possible. We need also large databases for open source. Also the camera databases would be excellent to have for verification and validity of camera comparison.

August 2009

This week I we have the meeting for the International Computational Forensics Workshop at the Netherlands Forensic Institute , where I am looking forward to. The proceedings have been published by Springer.

As you can see we have good weather in Zandvoort where I live.

Next week I will be at the Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFWRS) conference where I will give the keynote address. I am preparing the presentation, and of course certainly will address the NAS-report, the need of fast peer review within the area of digital Evidence (where I think the journal Digital Investigation works very rapid, since the articles are prepublished now, as also an article of Wiger and me.

This summer I had some time to work on the backlogs, so I think we can do the cases on time now. Summers are always good for working on backlogs, since the number of cases that arrive are less then during normal periods. And the summer period is excellent for working, since you are not disturbed by phone calls and meetings, due to the fact that most colleagues are on vacation. Some people say that this also might happen if there is a flue pandemic, since we are not allowed to have too many meetings then. Working from home is also good for the number of publications, since this is what one easily can do from home (casework is more difficult), and this might also work on having more peer reviewed articles in the area.

In september I will have the ENFSI forensic IT working group meeting in Wiesbaden, and at the EAFS in Glasgow also give a workshop, a paper, a poster and chair a meeting there. It is always a good venue to meet other forensic scientist, and to keep up with the developments.

Today I also received a phone call of the Netherland cyclist union if I would like to work with them on the situation for cyclist in Zandvoort since I wrote the city of Zandvoort a letter concerning the bike lanes. Of course it is nice to do this, since sometimes volunteer work is also nice to do next to your regular job as a forensic scientist.