October 2010 (2)

This week I went to Dalian, China to BIT's 1st forensic conference . It was a very nice venue and there were several tracks in parrellel. The opening ceremony was indeed impressing, also with Henry Lee, who told he was born in Taiwan, and also emphasised the importance of search strategies in forensic science.

Dr. Gerry LaPorte from the National Institute of Justice, emphasised also the culture within the forensic laboratories in the past that if you would make an error you could forget your carreer in forensic science. This is not good, since there is no room then to learn from past experiences, and improve the system. Also the implications of the NAS report will lead to more research to objectivation.

The conference had many good papers in objectivation, from speaker analysis to handwriting, cybercrime investigation to facial comparison and the limitations that exist there. It was good to see that there is more research on measuring the system and the error rate in forensic science, as well as having statistical analysis for improvement, also with the use of likelihood ratio calculations.

Dalian was also a very nice city to visit, near the waterfront, and with a fast developing center, with good transportation options, and excellent service. The confrence itself was also good for many new contacts within forensic science, and will also be organized next year.

October 2010

Last month the excellent organized meeting in Moscow of our ENFSI Forensic IT Working group. Many interesting presentations, also from Russian companies in forensic software.

I had also a court case were I had to testify in the week of the meeting, so it was a busy month, since there was also many casework which had to be finished. Also we had an excellent student who developed new and faster algorithms for PRNU comparison. And another student who did very good validation studies for PRNU (camera identification based on Photo Response Non Uniformity).

Also I received a request for posting 20 books you should read. Some of them are very good, however I miss at least a book on digital evidence, since this is becoming more important.

Currently there is also a call for project on forensic investigation of digital evidence from the European Commission in FP7, which attracts several parties.

I am also chairing the organisation of the education days in digital evidence for the Dutch police in November. The program is nearly ready, and it appears there are many new interesting developments.