Saturday, September 23, 2017

The nicest job I know is being a forensic (data) scientist


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 data is to consider.
The Netherlands Forensic Institute for me is a very nice place since I had my 25th year of celebration here and the organization is always changing in novel directions and giving new opportunities to learn and improve forensic science.
Since I work at the NFI and as a professor Forensic Data Science the University of Amsterdam, I also have several research projects (also for students) that work on digital evidence, as well as multimedia analysis. Also within European Horizon 2020 projects ASGARD and Marie Curie ESSENTIAL I am working on these topics combined with big data. International collaboration is important to optimize the solutions and prevent double work.
Currently I am also working on a special edition of the Journal Forensic Research of Taylor and Francis on digital evidence. It is an open access journal and the deadline is 1 december. If you have contributions, I would be happy to hear from you.
In the next months I am chairing the ENFSI Forensic IT Working group meeting in Barcelona from 7-10 November and I am also in the organizing committee of the EU IAI meeting in Amsterdam 12-13 October, so I look forward to see you there.