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Webinars

Cognitive Bias in Forensic Analyses

What does it mean when someone talks about human factors considerations or cognitive bias concerns in forensic science and what recommendations exist to address these concerns? This webinar will be followed by a group activity in which attendees will work through the simple implementation of a new framework to address concerns raised in the webinar.

This webinar and workshop are on-demand and available immediately.

Intentional Language in Forensic DNA Testimony & Reporting

This webinar is a practical training tool for criminal justice training partners and DNA analysts who intend to provide clear and accurate descriptions of DNA results in forensic testimony and reports. This event will include real-life examples of good reporting practices and poor testimony practices from transcripts with immediate tips on how to avoid making common mistakes.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Visual Diagnostics for Algorithmic Cartridge Case Comparisons

Automatic cartridge case comparison algorithms can be used to measure the similarity between two fired cartridge cases. However, many of these algorithms are difficult to interpret, understand, and audit. We introduce a suite of visual diagnostic tools that are useful for understanding the behavior of automatic comparison algorithms and introduce a novel algorithm that returns a probability that two cartridge cases originated from the same firearm.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Creating a Forensic Database of Footwear Impressions from Retail Tread Photos

Shoe tread impressions are one of the most common types of evidence left at crime scenes. The seminar will describe the development and evaluation of computer vision-based techniques for automatically matching class characteristics of crime scene evidence to a large-scale database of commercial footwear tread photos.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Unpacking Workplace Stress and Forensic Expert Decision-Making: From Theory to Practice

Workplace stress can affect forensic experts’ job satisfaction and performance, which holds financial and other implications for forensic service providers. Therefore, it is important to understand and manage workplace stress, but that is not simple or straightforward. This talk aims to help forensic service providers and policymakers to implement context-specific interventions to manage stress at work and optimize expert performance, by developing a deeper understanding of the stressors, their sources, and their possible impacts.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Presumption of Innocence, Probable Cause, and Prior Probability—Bayes Meets Due Process
Bayes Theorem has three ingredients:
  1. prior probability,
  2. likelihood ratio, and
  3. posterior probability.
Each one has important scientific, legal, and philosophical implications.

To make matters worse, the ingredients are often confused, conflated, and transposed. The goal of this presentation is to review the precepts of conditional probability, the notation of Bayes’ Formula, and the touchpoints with presumption of innocence and probable cause.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Inconclusive Decisions and Error Rates in Forensic Science

The treatment of inconclusive decisions and calculation of error rates have become controversial topics in forensic science. This presentation will provide a brief summary of the challenges, highlight prior viewpoints and suggestions that have been proposed to address the issues, and recommend a path forward for the forensic science community.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Algorithmic Assessment of Striation Similarity between Wire Cuts

There is no systematic algorithm to inspect striations on wires without manual extraction. A new, reproducible, automatic algorithm is proposed to analyze the similarity between wires. Interpreting the result correctly promises a consistent way of using wires as forensic evidence in the future.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Multi-Camera Smartphone Image Identification

Source camera identification uses small imperfections in a camera’s sensor array, called a camera fingerprint. We introduce the new CSAFE multi-camera smartphone image database and discuss how we adapt traditional camera identification methods to work on multi-camera smartphones.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.

Judging Firearms Evidence

While firearms comparison evidence is commonly used in criminal cases, we have seen a recent and growing resurgence of judicial skepticism of firearms comparison evidence. These recent rulings, responding to scientific critiques, followed, however, many decades of near-universal acceptance of the evidence. We analyze the path of judicial rulings in this important area of forensic evidence.

This webinar is on-demand and available immediately.