The authors describe a new approach to decision-making in an operational forensic science organization based on a model, embodying the principles of Bayesian inference, which has been developed through workshops run within the Forensic Science Service for forensic science practitioners. Issues which arise from the idea of pre-assessment of cases are explored by means of a case example.

ion and access in digital forensics, and how the two taxonomies are related. This presentation will impact the forensic community by introducing the digital forensic community to the theories and approaches utilized in the natural language processing community. Since the second World War, computer scientists and others have struggled to find computational methods to translate, understand, and m...

‘‘In any legitimate justice system, ... truth must play a paramount and integral role.... The very survival of the rule of law depends not only on a justice system that administers the law fairly, but a system that is just by being well-grounded in ... truth....[M]ore research is needed in the techniques and science already in use. With the importance of forensic science to truth and justice, t...

The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners' decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focus...

science&justice Volume 43 No.4 (2003) 249 – 252 Page 249 © The Forensic Science Society 2003

Teaching and learning methods need a continuous upgrade in higher education. However it is also true that some of the modern methodologies do not reduce or prevent school failure. Perhaps the real limitation is the inability to identify the true reasons that may explain it or ignore/undervalue the problem. In our opinion, one of the current constraints of the teaching/learning process is the ex...

This paper is a summary of findings of adult age-related craniofacial morphological changes. Our aims are two-fold: (1) through a review of the literature we address the factors influencing craniofacial aging, and (2) the general ways in which a head and face age in adulthood. We present findings on environmental and innate influences on face aging, facial soft tissue age changes, and bony chan...

Forensic investigations frequently utilize facial reconstructions/approximations to stimulate recognition and identification. Over the past 25 years, many computer-based systems have been developed, and with the recent rapid advances in medical imaging and computer technology, the current systems claim high levels of efficiency, objectivity, and flexibility. The history of computerized facial a...

Experts play a critical role in forensic decision making, even when cognition is offloaded and distributed between human and machine. In this paper, we investigated the impact of using Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) on human decision makers. We provided 3680 AFIS lists (a total of 55,200 comparisons) to 23 latent fingerprint examiners as part of their normal casework. We ma...