March 2012

March gave new insights on the different topics I am working on. Sometimes solving issues is asking the right questions, often the how questions, since they give somewhat more insight and instead of all doing myself it works best in teams with people, and especially multidisciplinary solutions are the nicest to see developing.

I also prepared an abstract for IALM 2012 in Istanbul at the AAFS-session there, as well as of course the EAFS 2012 that NFI organizes in The Hague. Many new things to develop, and it also works to have good students working on the different topics. March was my last vacation (next will be October), since I had time to read books as well as forensic literature. The casework is also giving some nice work and new ideas for R&D projects.

Also for ENFSI we are preparing the Forensic IT Working group meeting in Rome from 24-26 October 2012. It should be a good event. Also I saw that Europol will have the European Cybercrime Center, so this will be very nice to collaborate further on with the vice chair who is from Europol.

At some presentations I heard some discussions on the understanding of Bayesian conclusions by lawyers. The question that always arises if the conclusion that is logically correct is understood well by the readers of the reports. It takes some time to understand the conclusions as such for most people. However I see that people who are used to these kind of conclusions appear to understand them. However one of the most challenging issues is to have a calibration of conclusions among the forensic scientists and the different disciplines especially if it is subjective or a form of opinion, since often there is not enough statistical data to make it objective.

With some budget cuts to come, the main challenge is to find the most efficient and objective solutions and keep improving methods.