
Posted July 29, 2021
Researchers from the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE) will be sharing their latest research advancements at two upcoming professional meetings in August.
Joint Statistical Meetings

Alicia Carriquiry will receive the 2021 Florence Nightingale David Award on Aug. 11 and deliver the Florence Nightingale David Lecture on Aug. 12 at 12–1:50 p.m. Her presentation will be Statistics in the Pursuit of Justice: A More Principled Strategy to Analyze Forensic Evidence. Carriquiry is the director of CSAFE and Distinguished Professor and President’s Chair in statistics at Iowa State University. Discussants during the session will be Karen Kafadar, CSAFE co-director and professor and chair of statistics at the University of Virginia, and Maria Cuellar, CSAFE researcher and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Read more about Carriquiry’s award at https://forensicstats.org/news-posts/carriquiry-receives-the-florence-nightingale-david-award/.
Carriquiry is also one of three panelists invited to present on the panel titled “Leadership Through Storytelling: Lessons Learned from Data Science.” The panel will take place Aug. 8 at 1:30–3:20 p.m. EDT. It is sponsored by the Committee on Women in Statistics and the Caucus for Women in Statistics.
Papers
- Machine Learning Methods for Dependent Data Resulting from Forensic Evidence Comparison
Aug. 12 at 12-1:50 p.m. EDT
Danica Ommen and Federico Veneri, Iowa State University - How Do You Define a Circle? Perception and Computer Vision Diagnostics
Aug. 12 at 12-1:50 p.m. EDT
Susan Vanderplas, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Speed Session
- Reliability for Ordinal Data in Forensics
Aug. 8 at 11:25 a.m. EDT
Hina Arora, Hal Stern and Naomi Kaplan-Damry, University of California, Irvine (UCI)
Session
Addressing Individual Variation to Improve the Analysis of Forensic Evidence
Aug. 12 at 2-3:50 p.m. EDT
This session is organized by Kaplan-Damry, chaired by Carriquiry and the discussant is Nicholas Scurich, UCI.
- Bayesian Item Response Theory for Human Factors in Forensic Science
Amanda Luby, Swarthmore University - What Can We Learn from Proficiency Testing at Forensic Laboratories
Robin Mejia, Carnegie Mellon University - How Can Learning More Information Lead to a Worse Outcome? A Probabilistic Formalization of Contextual Bias in Forensic Analysis
Cuellar, Luby and Jacqueline Mauro, Google - Using Mixture Models to Examine Group Differences: Studying Juror Perceptions of the Strength of Forensic Science Evidence
Kaplan-Damary, Willian Thompson, Rebecca Hofstein Grady and Hal Stern, UCI
The Joint Statistical Meetings is the largest gathering of statisticians and data scientists held in North America. It will be held virtually Aug. 8-12. For more information, visit https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2021/.
ASCLD Symposium
Carriquiry will speak at the annual symposium of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD). Her lecture, Pattern Evidence Research at CSAFE, will provide an update on some of CSAFE’s research activities.
The ASCLD Symposium is an industry-leading conference designed for leaders and managers in the forensic laboratory space. It will be held on Aug. 22-26 in Boston. For more information, visit www.ascldsymposium.com.
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