January 2006

January is a month with new thoughts and plans. Finishing some casework from 2005, with length measurements and 3D techniques. Also plans with new projects for Biometrics are currently developed. Furthermore, in these months we will have several students for our Research and Development projects.

Also a deliverable of FIDIS www.fidis.org is finished, and I am looking forward to work on the next parts of FIDIS. I hope we will have a new candidate working on profiling.

The next thing is working on some writing of short articles and editing a chapter of a encyclopedia. As chairman of the AAFS engineering section, we have the conference in February, and there is also lots of preparation for the presentations and workshop.

Currently we are also busy working more closely together with the police on forensic service centers. I have some plans with doing more research and development together and analysis of video and biometric information from CCTV-systems.

This month I was also elected as chair of our union. So some additional time to spend. As long as I do not have to much administration, and just do the things I like, it will work out well. It is just the combination of the work, that willl give you a flow of working.

And of course I also have to take care about ENFSI and the EAFS-meeting. We submitted a workshop meeting, and are trying to organize a steering commitee meeting in Helsinki. However we also have to submit some abstracts for this. www.eafs2006.com

As always I am optimistic about the future. This week I was also on Dutch televsion with some kind of CSI-program where I demonstrated the value of 3D models and reconstructions.

Looking back to 2005

Just finishing work and cleaning up the administration. This year has been a year with a wide variety of issues. The organization of conferences, doing some casework, several research initiatives and chairing the ENFSI-FIT group and the AAFS Engineering Sciences Section. I look back to nice conferences from ENFSI, IAFS and AAFS this year, and hope the cooperation in 2006 will be even better.

We see that the Internet is evolving and initiatives as the wikipedia are a good example how book publishers have a real problem to survive with their current marketing situation. I also have to write several contributions, however it appears to be more difficult, since information is not as fast as on the Internet. The valuable reviews are of course important, however for the reviewer it is getting more complicated to do an in-depth review. It is for example when I started in forensic science feasible to do some review of source code of software. Also this gets more complicated, since we have to take into account that also the operating systems upgrade very fast, and it is in theory possible that a certain program will work different on a different version of the OS with a bugfix. Having said that, we certainly should put effort in validating and reviewing the information in a prompt and proper way as is feasible.

What did I learn further this year ? As always projects tend to take more time then expected. I have some backlog with several projects. In contrary there are also projects that work better then expected, since not all things are predictable. It is the same with casework. It is nice to think that in some ways we are working in a casino-society as some people call it. The forecasts influence the results, and in this way many processes become inpredictable.

Also this year we did some step forward with the Bayesian conclusions in our report. The readability is still a problem :

In the past we had conclusions as probable etc. Now we have conclusions as there is support for a certain conclusion. This year we had discussions to modify it to from the examination results hypothesis 1 is more probable then hypothesis 2. We will see what happens, however the form of this conclusion might also change.

December

As allways December is a month to reconsider and finish work (especially the last week of December is very quiet, and is good to do that research you had never time for if you have to go to work). In this month of course casework, and always the conflict between speed and quality. Managers want to have the cases processed faster each time, however the problem is that chances for mistakes are somewhat higher then. However of course, I may not complain, since they are also aware of this issue.

This month some vacation time, a meeting in Rome with the ENFSI chairpersons of the working groups, some meetings etc. I was also busy with our internal certification process. The rules around this system are sometimes to strict in my opinion. Last week a colleague should have an exam with expert witnesses from Germany and the UK. Suddenly they stopped this examination since some of the details in new rules (that were not approved yet), were not fulfilled. It is the bureaucrazy;) that rules. A better alternative might be an independent or perhaps several bodies that does this kind of testing, and not a combination of colleagues. There are several efforts for this, for instance in the UK, the USA and within the ENFSI.

Of course also preparing work for the AAFS-conference and several other meetings. For FIDIS a re-review of a document. All to be finished at the end of December, so perhaps it will not be a quiet month after all.

November

This month we had a part of our deliverable with spoofing biometric devices ready, which is available from

http://forensic.to/webhome/geradts/Biometric_devices.doc . The final version of the complete FIDIS document will be ready in two months and available from www.fidis.net . I also received many questions and some remarks of manufacturers for the presentation that I gave at www.biometrics.e-symposium.com . It appears that people download the presentation from this site later on. It was my first experience with this kind of e-symposium. Normally the information will be corrected later on in questions. Since the voice is recorded, in this case it appeared that one of the claims I did was somewhat overstated. We could not circumvent the vein scanner liveness detection with the version that was delivered later in our research. What did I learn from this ? In these kinds of presentations it is better to write out the information first, and then record the information.

This month I was also busy with some ddos-attacks on the www.forensic.to site and moving the forens-l mailing list www.forensic.to/forens to this server.

October

This month was quiet. I had vacation (this time we went to Izmir, Turkey), and could finish some reports for FIDIS. Of course always busy with preparing meetings, some casework, some research and development and new project plans for 2005. I was somewhat confused by a Dutch journalist/writer who wrote that I am an ubernerd.

The eyes still went well, and I could see more than in the past. I was wondering how this works out in visual comparison in the day to day job as a forensic scientist. It would be good to start a project on this. Now I can see 140 percent and it used to be 120 percent (compared to the average person who can see 100 percent).

September -3

The laser-operation worked out well. I can see more clearly then ever before. Last week we had the ENFSI Forensic IT conference joint with FIDIS and IOCE. There were over 50 participants, and it was organized in Amsterdam, with a visit to our new lab in Den Haag. It seemed to be excellent and there were many good presentations. Much was focused on mobile devices.

Our lab was in the dutch news, more information is available from http://www.expatica.com/source/forum_thread.asp?channel_id=1&thread_id=29307 . There was lots of discussion on this during the last week in dutch press.