July 2010

Last week I testified in a court case on images, and as usual people become confused with the things they see on CSI and the forensic examination of images and video. I often have to explain that sometimes the image processing which is shown at CSI is not realistic, since we have to cope with the limitation of the sensors, and they have a limited resolution. Often on CCTV it is difficult to do a proper forensic comparison of faces and other objects, and a limited conclusion can be drawn from it. However, there are exceptions.

It is getting summer now, and I do not have any backlog anymore in casework, so we can schedule better, however sometimes cases come in at unexpected moments, and it can change very soon. We are also working on new work for the camera identification, as well as forensic examinations of colours from objects. Before August 1st, I will also propose one or two papers, and perhaps a workshop for next years AAFS www.aafs.org meeting. Furthermore, we are currently working on the ENFSI Forensic IT Working group meeting in Moscow in September www.enfsi.org .

June 2010

Last month was busy with the World Conference on IT where the NFI also signed a MOU with Microsoft. I gave a presentation on the huge efforts that we have to do in reverse engineering of software and hardware for extracting information from devices from manufacturers. Some manufacturers will provide information on their file formats, however others do not know or will not give information, and then we have to spend lots of time on reverse engineering, which also could be spend on examining other products such as reverse engineering malware in forensic casework.

It was also busy with casework and of course the R&D projects. Currently I also have three students that are working on camera identification under the different circumstances. And of course we have many groups of students that are working on various programming tasks, such as our open source software defraser for video analysis and repair. Also there we further progress, as we have version which is much more interactive which will be released soon.

Next week we organize a tour and BBQ as well as a day on forensic video investigation for our customers (currently over 100 people have signed up), and then it gets summer, so somewhat more time to spend on writing reports, articles etc. During the WCIT I was also invited for the Techno Security 2010 in Myrtle Beach to give a presentation, however due to the huge amount of work, I was unable to be there, however I will give some contribution to the conference via Skype.

May 2010

Last month everything went well, and when I was in Moscow I was impressed with the organization of the meeting in September for ENFSI our working group on Forensic IT. This month we will also have the WCIT 2010 in Amsterdam, where I have received the opportunity to speak on Forensic Science and new developments within digital evidence and related areas.

As usual some casework, and currently due to economic situation, also within in forensic science, many labs have issues with budget cuts, since many labs are government owned, and currently many governments have to reduce costs. However as usual, this situation also give opportunities for new developments to have more efficiency and keeping the same, high quality. The last 20 years that I worked, I experienced several of these cuts, however it is not easy to predict what will happen, and each time there are different solutions.

Fwd: zonsondergang

The sunset from our house is different from usual due to the ash from the volcano.

April 2010

Now we do not have backlogs in casework in image analysis anymore, due to the more structured approach of handling cases. It is also a nice month for preparations. The proficiency test for camera identification is working well, and it is good to see that the different labs have comparable results.

At the end of this month, I will go to the steering committee of ENFSI www.enfsi.org in Moscow, since we will have our meeting from our working group in Moscow in September. Furthermore, I am also working on the security track of www.wcit2010.org in Amsterdam.

And defraser, the software for analysis of video has now a very good preview mode, and it will be available soon via http://sourceforge.net/projects/defraser/ . We are exciting about this option, since it makes the software more interactive.

March 2009

The conference of the AAFS in Seattle was excellent. With our completely revised workshop, we had many good comments. Furthermore, our section Digital and Multimedia Sciences also had very good papers, and of course there were many possibilities for exchange and networking. During this meeting I was elected as Director of our Section for the Board of Directors of the AAFS.

February 2010

A cold month with lots of snow. However also nice developments are going on. The American Academy of Forensic Sciences with the Annual meeting in Seattle will be a very nice event. I will chair the revised workshop on Multimedia Analysis, where we will also have a hands on training on camera identification. Also analysis of video files will be a part of this, and since I am chairman of the Section Digital and Multimedia Sciences, it is nice to see that the field is expanding further. And this week I am also working on many new students that start with projects and developing software for the open source sourceforge.net that we have for forensic software.

We have several students that work in house, however also many have projects that will be run from the universities / hogescholen in the Netherlands themselves. The students Informatics with a minor on Forensics of the Hogeschool Amsterdam will also start with several projects. Sometimes we had extremely good results. Most often this happens if the project is small, well defined, and ofen development in Java or .NET will give good results. Working on existing projects remains a challenge, since often documentation remains an issue.

In the meantime, we are preparing the conference for our Working Group of Forensic IT of ENFSI in Moscow, Russia. It will be in September, more information is available soon. And in the meantime, I have also some casework and other work to do. However good planning is always half of the work.