Forensic science in 2018

Within the forensic science community much effort is taken to develop better standards and best practice guides for the different fields of forensic science. Also several ISO-standards are available or in development .

Currently much effort is conducted for forensic analysis directly at the crime scene, so the results are faster available. In the digital forensic field we see that much effort is taken to approach the data, though it is getting more complicated due to strong encryption due to privacy concerns of users. However, often solutions are found with hard work.

The use of databases of traces is progressing. Many databases exists for example for bio-metrics, such as DNA, fingerprints, speakers, faces and many other traces in forensic areas. The use of these databases should be expanded to other areas in forensic science, since this is important for providing statistical information, and also artificial intelligence algorithms can be trained by using these. Also I see that we need some algorithms for finding errors in forensic reports as well as court cases in order to improve forensic finding of future reports. For this reason also forensic data science is a field that is expanding rapidly and also many projects work on improving databases and knowledge in forensic science.

I look forward to much good progress within the forensic community and also hope on much collaboration, since we need to collaborate to solve the many challenges in forensic science.