Sunday, August 28, 2011

September 2011

As usual it is busy in September after the vacation. I had a phone conference call with the Board of Directors of the AAFS www.aafs.org at 2 am in the morning. I am getting used to it, however it takes always some time to get back to sleep afterwards, it is good to see the next call is earlier.

The ENFSI Forensic IT Working group meeting in Riga is approaching, as well as other meetings which I have to prepare. Currently also new students come in for projects on biometric devices and PRNU as well as heart beat. In October I have a meeting in Montreal were I am invited speaker and a meeting in China. Later on I have a week vacation, so lots of travelling in the meantime.

Also I was asked for a forensic cruise, and I was wondering what happens there. People seem to enjoy forensic topics on cruises, so who knows perhaps I might join such a cruise as invited speaker in future.

Monday, August 01, 2011

August 2011

August is always the time for writing articles and papers, and working on backlogs and doing new proposals for projects etc. Just finished submitting abstracts to the AAFS conference in Atlanta in 2012 . Also preparing our ENFSI FIT Working group meeting Forensic IT in Riga .

I am working on a paper for an encyclopedia on identity fraud, and of course the forensic invesigation of this topic. In the past we worked on issues around identity issues with biometric systems and spoofing etc within FIDIS.

Currently also the financial situation in Europe is getting more troublesome, so I expect more government cuts in future. It is always good to be prepared for this, and hopefully forensic science will not be hurt too much. Unfortunately we saw already in the United Kingdom that the government shut down the Forensic Science Service, the largest forensic science lab in Europe at the beginning of this year.

Also interested to see how the CSI effect will evolve, sometimes I get called to court with questions concerning image processing in CSI and why we can not do the same. Perhaps the expectations will go to the regular level again, since nowadays there are many students in forensic science, however it is not easy to get a job, since in general there are not that many vacancies. This is different for forensic ICT where we see that it is more difficult to have vacancies fulfilled in informatics and related areas, since it is expected that casework in cybercrime and related areas will grow.