July 2009

Just finished some casework for the vacation. It appears that I have more time than originally planned, since I do not have to testify in a case overseas. Sometimes forensic science can be inpredictable in planning. In the meantime I had some work on cases with different opinions of several expert witnesses, and analysing the forensic work behind these.

I am also preparing on the Digital Forensic Research Workshop in Montreal, where I am invited speaker http://www.dfrws.org/. It is an excellent conference with a challenge, and I am looking forward to it. The week before we have our International Workshop of Computational Forensics IWCF09 http://iwcf09.arsforensica.org/ and I received a message from Springer that the conference proceedings have been nearly finished.

In September, I will have the ENFSI Forensic IT working group (where I am a chair of) conference at the Bundes Kriminal Amt in Wiesbaden, Germany http://www.bka.de/kriminalwissenschaften/enfsi/ki_enfsi_index.html. The week after the European Academy of Forensic Sciences, will be held http://www.eafs2009.com/, where I also chair a workshop on Digital Forensics, and have a paper on PRNU http://sourceforge.net/projects/prnucompare/ and a poster on defraser http://sourceforge.net/projects/defraser/.

In the meantime, we have to finish our proposals for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences www.aafs.org , before August 1st, so I have already written some abstracts. Furthermore I am also reviewing some interesting papers and proposals in the mean time, and it seems we have a very interesting year in forensic science.

Also interesting is the work for the WCIT 2010 in Amsterdam, where NFI is doing the cybersecurity and safety track, which is really exciting http://www.wcit2010.com/ and I am also helping with some work on this.

In the meantime, I have to do some new research work, and of course some students and colleagues that work on these projects. 2009 has been a very fruitful year already, and I think it is good to collaborate, and realize that the good collaboration with colleagues and project partners is of most importance to be succesful. Where of course good discussions are as important.

June 2009

Last weeks I had some travelling to Cyprus and Ankara for the FIDIS project and for the ENFSI annual meeting in Ankara. It was organized very well, and also I received the opportunity to give a presentation concerning our working group Forensic IT (which will have a meeting in September in Wiesbaden ). At the meeting most ENFSI-members (directors of Forensic Institutes) where present. The EAFS 2009 meeting in Glasgow was also discussed, where also focus will be on Digital Evidence, and I also have to do some preparation work. It is good to see there is a digital technology track at this conference.



It is also interesting to see the different efforts of forensic registers of practicioners. It appears that the CRFP in the United Kingdom has been ceased, as is also shown on their website http://www.crfp.org.uk/. In the Netherlands we have a law on forensic expertise, so I expect this to be a more solid register, however it is interesting to see the conversion process from the old system to the new system which will start July 1st.



This year is also a good publication year for me, since several papers, and book chapters have been / will be published. Last years we had many students that also did a lot of research work, and this helps also in the development of tools and of course writing articles. The number of cases that I handle is stable, and of course new challenges are given there. Also research of PRNU is now used in the casework for camera comparison. In real casework it does however not always work, since sometimes other patterns are recognized.

May 2009

It appears that google latitude also works at this website, since I have added the location from my mobile phone to this site. Currently I am in Cyprus, Paphos, where we have a summit of FIDIS and we have a review meeting of our deliverables. Also the summit book is presented here. Within the network also a warning is given for giving away mobile information without being aware. The project will finish soon, and we had three deliverables on biometric devices, forensic profiling and identification of images.

April 2009 (2)

It was a nice month, with some casework, some work for the Forensic IT working group of ENFSI www.enfsi.org and developing new tools that are also used in casework such as http://prnucompare.sourceforge.net/, which were developed by our team. It includes now also wavelet methods published by Fridrich et. al. and batch processing, since these methods can be time consuming in calculation time.

It is good to see that work in literature is implemented in easy to use open source software, such that published methods in literature are available in the open source community, and it becomes easier to validate the different software approaches. We also have a database with some examples on line at http://forensic.to/prnu . Of course validation of the uniqueness of PRNU patterns with different cameras is always needed before reporting and drawing conclusions based on the results.

April 2009

In this time, after my vacation, we finally do not have much backlog, so more time to review articles, and preparing presentations and of course to make new projects. 

I also went to an interesting conference in the Netherlands, about problems in forensic expertise in Amsterdam, organized by the court of Amsterdam, where also lawyers could attend.  This conference also went in depth in to different aspects of forensic science, eyewitness testimonies, forensic psychiatry and how the court interprets the findings. There was also some discussion about the NAS-report , and also having a forensic entitity as meant in this report in the Netherlands. One of the examples that was given, was the Phantom of Heilbron , where 40 cases in Western Europe where linked based on DNA for no apparent reason also with a murder case. It finally appeared to be a contamination case, since the cotton swabs where contaminated by the producer of these swabs with DNA of one of the employees. It is good that this came out, since now other labs are also aware of this kind of contamination, and can look at there quality assurance system to prevent this.

Also the issue that forensic scientists can be biased based on the information they will receive around a case, and that this might influence there conclusion. Ton Broeders  presented a method to prevent this, by doing blind examination in comparison cases.

March 2009

This month did not go as smoothly as usual. There were numerous positive aspects, such as publications that got accepted, some nice development in research, backlogs that disappeared in casework, nice European projects and such. Also the credit crisis might influence the money to spend in forensic science, however it is not clear yet. Last week I had a worst week. Since my asthma got worse, I went to the lung doctor. There I received a new medicine with the nice name "Foster" and a fancy purple packing, which is new on the market. Since I had issues with lung medicine before, I asked if it could influence my heart, however the amount was for children oto begin with. So, I took the inhaler when I traveled from the hospital by train to Den Haag. When I was sitting in the train I felt a severe pain on the chest. At that time, I was near the University hospital of Leiden. I went out of the train, and walked to the emergency room of this hospital.

Then it appeared that the ECG was not as usual, and they told me it was wise to do a catheterisation where they could check on coronary spasms. With this procedure, they will inject a fluid and look if a coronary spasm occurs during the catheterisation. After two days at the coronary care, where I had to lay on bed with the cables, they did a catheterisation. Then I had these spasms during the procedure when they injected this fluid. Since I used some other medicines during the test (nitroglycerin and a calcium blocker), the effect was reduced, however I had the same reaction as with the medicine I used when I had the pain on the chest. So possibly I had some coronary spasms due to the medicine I used that morning. I remembered that I also had the same with similar lung medicines, so it appears I was sensitive to this (and this reaction does not often happen). Further all vessels where clean, so that is nice to hear. The angioseal they used for sealing the vessel came out, so I had to stay several hours longer, however it was nice that I could walk again at the end of that day, of course with some bruises. Also the cause was known, so that makes a difference.

Next morning I had a course, so I could even be there, and I enjoyed it even more then usual, since being in a hospital (although the care was excellent), is not the nicest thing to do. Then a week vacation in Turkey, and looking forward to start working again.

February 2009 (2)

The http://www.aafs.org/ meeting in Denver was excellent, and our new section Digital and Multimedia sciences has started the first year. I am happy that the members re-elected me as chairperson for another year, so we can build further on the new section. Also the workshop was visited well, and there were many good papers. During the meeting, also the NAS-report was published http://www.nas.edu/morenews/20090218.html that the forensic science field is fragmented, and there is need to have more scientific research established in this field, as well as coordination. So, it would be excellent if good actions are made to improve these findings, since many of them are also true in the rest of the world.



It would be nice if this would result in a more research and also more statistics on methods used in forensic science. Of course, many forensic scientists are aware of the issues, however the question is if the court is aware of the limitations that can exist in a forensic report or testimony. There are several efforts made to have a more scientific way of reporting, for example with Bayesian rules and likelihood ratios. The difficult part in these is that the reporting gets more complicated, and the question is if the reader of the reports understands these conclusions. However in these cases it is important to mention that often a subjective scale is used. See for example http://www.intermin.fi/intermin/images.nsf/files/6C8438A4F3468012C2256D0A00284C02/$file/IBSTE2002_Vol8_3.pdf .

Furthermore we just published our new PRNU comparison for www.fidis.net on https://sourceforge.net/projects/prnucompare/ for camera comparison and the enf collector for collecting variations in the electricity signal https://sourceforge.net/projects/nfienfcollector/.