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 ..read more

The wide range of aspects a forensic scientist should handle, makes it for me a wide range of opportunities. The idea is to use the data and databases that exist useful for forensic interpretation and in the end use as evidence in court. In August I gave at the IAFS in Toronto a talk on deep learning and forensic evidence. To prepare data often scripting language such as Python is used, and we see lot of open source solutions being developed. Knowledge of databases i, and the handling of multimodal data is important. Also heterogeneous data as well as the veracity and validity of d ..read more

The increase of digital video data is still growing very fast, it is stated that 90 percent of the data on earth is created in the last two years. Also sensors of a self driving car could make 100 Gigabytes per second and suppose only a fraction is send to the cloud, then we have huge amounts of data that can be analyzed. When this has to be analyzed we need fast methods for selection of relevant data. For humans it would not be feasible to process these amounts of data manually, so machine learning is one of the options to solve this. As chair of forensic data science at the Institute for ..read more

In November I was the second reader of the PhD defense of the thesis of Michael Gruhn at the FAU University in Erlangen on rootkit and anti forensics software and how this can impact forensic science. In December I was one of the promotors of the PhD defense of the thesis of Paul Duyn on criminal networks and a data driven approach on the different criminal networks as a complex adaptive system at the University of Amsterdam. The combination of both approaches might even give more new insights, and nowadays there appears to be a growing interest in forensic data science since new app ..read more

The growth of different databases might have impact on forensic science, and certainly the validation. One of the issues of the data in the databases should be that they should be relied on and that the ground truth is known. Often the cleaning of data is necessary and the process should be followed according to strict rules to keep the integrity. Nowadays we also see databases such as 23andme.com where the public can receive their genome data and in the Netherlands they even allow you to give you the inherited conditions, drug response, genetic risk factors and traits for informational purpo ..read more

One of the challenges in forensic science, is to receive results quickly after a crime happened. We will discuss in this blog three developments which help in speeding up the forensic investigation. 1. Mobile labs  The development of labs on the crime scene is a challenging one. We can see several developments in DNA and chemistry to receive faster results after a crime has happened. Also in digital evidence we see several mobile solutions to collect the data from the crime scene. The lab-on-a-chip techniques are also contributing to faster results. 2. Big data By using big data and ana ..read more

During the conference of Digital Forensic Research Workshop EU in Lausanne several topics were important. A wide range of new developments was published in the proceedings. During the keynote talks also attention was given to the issues with decryption of smart phones and several solutions were brought to attention, as well as the paradox that exists between security and digital evidence. Other solutions and issues were brought forward on collecting data from the cloud as digital evidence, as well as issues with time stamps that might occur. A nice panel discussion on the differ ..read more

Enhanced support for Forensic Science Mar 16, 2016 0 views 0 Likes 0 Comments Share on LinkedIn Share on Facebook Share on Twitter It was good to see that in England and Wales Forensic Science is attracting more attention of government and that now steps are made to improve the system. Also the realization that we have to move from the lab to the crime scene with new mobile techniques to have "real time" results, will lead to changes in the system. However quality assurance remains vital in these new developments, and we see much progress is made with new standards. L ..read more

This month I went to the AAFS www.aafs.org meeting in Las Vegas.  It was a very well attended meeting with over 4200 participants and 600 international.  There were many excellent papers presented and it is good to see the forensic science strengthening in the USA.  As Vice president I was elected to Treasurer. I also received the Carrie Morgan Whitcomb award.  Furthermore our section Digital and Multimedia Sciences organized several well attended workshop.  Also as Chair of the think tank we saw many new developments that have impact on forensic science ranging from d ..read more

This year looks very nice, with several new opportunities. The combination of casework and research projects is always challenging and bringing new solutions which can be used in casework. Current projects on biometric spoofing as well as on drone forensics give some new insights. I look forward to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in February, where I am currently Vice President. Together with Laura Liptai and the Theoretical Forensic Science Committee of the Forensic Science Foundation, we prepared a workshop with new developments in forensic ..read more