Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence

This week I have been visiting the new Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence. The center involves four universities, CMU, ISU, UC-Irvine, U. Virginia, and is a NIST Center of Excellence. The kickoff event occurred over Oct 26-27 at ISU, organized by Center Director, Professor Alicia Carriquiry. The speaker list included Barry Scheck (Co-Founder, The Innocence Project), Jo Handelsman (The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy), Philip Dawid (Emeritus Professor of Statistics, University of Cambridge), Anil Jain (Michigan State University) and Stephen Feinberg (CMU). Small discussion groups included these topics shoe prints, firearms forensics, human factors, cyber forensics and pattern evidence. This is the start of potential collaborations between statisticians and forensic scientists to build better quantification of uncertainty in evidence.

Here is a link to the CSAFE web site.