CSAFE All Hands Meeting June 7-9 2017

1pm Session: Statistical Foundations

This meeting was very cohesive. Everyone was respectful of one another and the facilitator kept the flow moving within the session. The core theme of this session revolved around a handful of ideas.

  1. Access to information. There needs to be trust between disciplines. Forensic scientists and statisticians need to have a good relationship to achieve common goals. Cooperation, engagement, and understanding are key elements. Statisticians and forensic scientists need to educate themselves in each other’s professions to get the most out of their work. Open access data is vital.
  2. How reliable is the data? Garbage in. Garbage out. If statisticians don’t have access to data that is accurate or matters then the inference will be inaccurate.
  3. Education. Knowledge in multiple disciplines can only benefit research. Active participation is necessary. The more statisticians know about forensics the better prepared they are to know how to collect data and evaluate given data. Statisticians should be involved in forensics and visit laboratories and crime labs. Part of Education is also giving tools to make difficult concepts easier to understand. Dr. Carriquiry of Iowa State University/CSAFE and Sarena Weisner of The Israeli Police both discussed scores that could be used to interpret statistical significance in their work with shoeprints. This score based system would need to be developed and easy for the general public to understand.

3:15pm Session: Shoeprints

This session was also put together very well. I liked it because there were professionals from different backgrounds so there were many points of view. The Israeli Police discussed their methods for compiling their shoeprint database. They talked about testing many shoes and getting multiple impressions over periods of time. “Accidentals” are unique marks on shoes that occur with wear and can indicate a person’s involvement in a crime. Former FBI investigators were interested to see if a person’s gender or gait could be determined by shoeprints. The statisticians replied that this wasn’t a good indication because often times there are only partial prints left at a crime scene and gait or gender would be impossible to identify. The Israeli’s work was very interesting to me. The people involved in their organization have put in so much work and have a deep understanding of statistics and forensics. I would enjoy being surrounded by all of their impressive research. A problem with acquiring all available shoeprints is analyzing every shoe. Daniel Attinger an engineer from Iowa State proposed shoe scanners in public places. Mark with CSAFE offered his four pairs of running shoes (identical) to the Israeli Police for analysis. Future proposals for work with shoeprint analysis were: ways to measure erosion, ways to express degrees of wear, 3D scanning to identify percentage of wear.

Poster Session: Training Statisticians in Forensic Science

In all honesty I chose this poster for a few reasons. There was a lack of statistical mathematics on it and it was one of the only posters that didn’t have a picture of researchers in a lab on it. I felt as if my meager undergraduate statistical studies were inadequate when compared to graduate and doctoral students and professionals present at this conference. I wanted a poster that wasn’t ripe with likelihood functions and conditional probabilities. A common theme to the conference was that statisticians need to understand forensics better to provide tools that will benefit forensic science. I spoke with Jeff Holt of University of Virginia. The title of his poster was Training Statisticians in Forensic Science. His poster was explaining an experimental class in statistics for forensic science. The class will become available in 2018. I asked Jeff if there were any plans for a major/minor or a certification. He replied that there weren’t any plans yet to expand. My brother is an educator and resides in Virginia. Perhaps I will check out University of Virginia next time I visit. He was nice to speak with. After I spoke with Jeff I had a conversation with Mark Pollitt. He gave me information on NIST, OSAC, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He works for the Park Service and told me about wildlife forensics. I enjoyed speaking with both of these men. They were polite and full of information.

This was an amazing opportunity. I was surrounded by so many talented people coming together to improve the accuracy and precision of forensic science. It was fascinating and impressive. I am thankful that I was able to participate.