Thursday, March 31, 2005

April

Last month some thoughts on combining an IOCE www.ioce.org and ENFSI-Forensic IT www.enfsi.org meeting together with www.fidis.net FIDIS (1 day) in September in Amsterdam. I think this might work out, since we might share experience with personal certification and accreditation in the field of digital evidence, and of course look into the future of identification systems (like biometric devices, but also digital right management systems and future tracking in mobiles etc) together with the EU network of excellence.

In March I had to work on several cases (which I can not go in detail here). Furthermore many colleagues (including myself) had some symptoms that seemed like flue. There were also several official visits to our new building, and since I am involved in a project on biometrics, it appears that there are many questions from those visitors and much interest in this topic, since the new passport will have a biometric chip in it.

The FIDIS network of excellence www.fidis.net had a meeting in Berlin, which is a city that I like very much. We had to discuss the deliverables, and I think it was a good meeting, since we have our plans ready now. One of the other topics is also identity theft or fraud with the identity systems.

It appeared that our Prince-2 www.prince2.org project management system also had some good points : the end users will become more involved in the projects. The negative point I see at the moment is that the project plans are not easy to read and of course, more bureauracry.

Thursday, March 03, 2005

March

It was a busy but inspiring month. At the beginning of the month we had an open day for our relations for the new facility of the NFI. You can view this facility at www.nieuwbouwnfi.nl which is especially made for our Institute. It is a very transparant building, with labs on the outside and offices in the inner part.

Of course some casework, and deadlines of reports that have to be met. Projectplans that should be revised and other kind of administration tasks. Last week it ended with the American Academy of Forensic Science meeting in New Orleans. It was a huge conference with 3500 participants.

We organized a workshop on digital imaging with more than fourty participants. Furthermore I was secretary of the Engineering Sciences section, and now am Chairman of this section for one year. There were developments concerning establishing a digital evidence section, which is seen more and more in forensic science laboratories. In our lab we have 40 employees in this field, which is over 10 percent of the total population of the laboratory.

The week ended with the scientific session, and together with the general session it was on digital evidence. My colleagues of the NFI presented several papers from ear comparison, to three dimensional visualisation. I presented a paper on investigation of integrity of images and a paper on biometric devices.