Our goal is to share how CSAFE research directly impacts the forensic science community. To connect you with the latest advancements, our team publicizes research results in peer-reviewed scientific journals and at worldwide forensic science conferences.
Below you will find links to full publications resulting from center research, as well as copies of recent presentation slides. Looking for more CSAFE products? Find research tools and datasets in our resources section.
Materials By Research Area
Found 233 Results
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The q–q Boxplot
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics
Published: 2021 | By: Jordan Rodu
Boxplots have become an extremely popular display of distribution summaries for collections of data, especially when we need to visualize summaries for several collections simultaneously. The whiskers in the boxplot show only the extent of the tails for most of…
A Study in Reproducibility: The Congruent Matching Cells Algorithm and cmcR Package
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Firearms and Toolmarks
Published: 2023 | By: Joseph Zemmels
Scientific research is driven by our ability to use methods, procedures, and materials from previous studies and further research by adding to it. As the need for computationally-intensive methods to analyze large amounts of data grows, the criteria needed to…
Forensic Science in Legal Education
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Training and Education
Published: 2021 | By: brandon Garrett
In criminal cases, forensic science reports and expert testimony play an increasingly important role in adjudication. More states now follow a federal reliability standard, following Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals and Rule 702, which call upon judges to assess the…
The Contribution of Forensic and Expert Evidence to DNA Exoneration Cases: An Interim Report
Type: Publication,Reports Research Area(s): DNA,Forensic Statistics,Implementation and Practice
Published: 2023 | By: Simon Cole
This report is from Simon A. Cole, Vanessa Meterko, Sarah Chu, Glinda Cooper, Jessica Weinstock Paredes, Maurice Possley, and Ken Otterbourg (2022), The Contribution of Forensic and Expert Evidence to DNA Exoneration Cases: An Interim Report (National Registry of Exonerations…
How Minutiae Frequency is Perceived and Used by Fingerprint Analysts in the Evaluation of Fingerprint Evidence
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Latent Print
Published: 2023 | By: Adele Quigley-McBride
Analysts consider the appearance, placement, and number of features within a fingerprint pattern (called minutiae) that correspond when deciding whether two fingerprints originated from the same person. Little is known about the actual base rates for different minutiae. That said,…
Likelihood ratios for categorical count data with applications in digital forensics
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Digital,Forensic Statistics
Published: 2022 | By: Rachel Longjohn
We consider the forensic context in which the goal is to assess whether two sets of observed data came from the same source or from different sources. In particular, we focus on the situation in which the evidence consists of…
CSAFE Project Update & ASCLD FRC Collaboration
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Digital,Firearms and Toolmarks,Footwear,Forensic Statistics,Handwriting,Implementation and Practice
Published: 2022 | By: Jeff Salyards
This presentation highlighted CSAFE’s collaboration with the ASCLD FRC Collaboration Hub.
Reliability for Binary and Ordinal Data in Forensics
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics
Published: 2022 | By: Hina Arora
Black-box studies are a crucial part of assessing the accuracy and reliability of subjective decisions in forensics. The extant black-box studies have generally had two components. In the first study, examiners are asked to assess forensic samples (typically questioned and…
Uncertainty in probabilistic genotyping of low template DNA: A case study comparing STRMix™ and TrueAllele™
Type: Publication Research Area(s): DNA,Forensic Statistics
Published: 2023 | By: William Thompson
Two probabilistic genotyping (PG) programs, STRMix™ and TrueAllele™, were used to assess the strength of the same item of DNA evidence in a federal criminal case, with strikingly different results. For STRMix, the reported likelihood ratio in favor of the…
Understanding forensic decision-making with Item Response Theory: Using a NFI firearms study
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics,Implementation and Practice
Published: 2022 | By: Amanda Luby
This presentation is from the Forensic Big Data Colloquium at the Netherlands Forensic Institute, November 2022. Posted with permission of CSAFE.
Source identification of shoeprints in mock crime scene using an algorithm based on automatic alignment
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Footwear,Forensic Statistics
Published: 2023 | By: Hana Lee
This presentation is from the 75th Anniversary Conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Orlando, Florida, February 13-18, 2023. Posted with permission of CSAFE
Ensemble of Score Likelihood Ratios under the common source problem
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics
Published: 2023 | By: Frederico Veneri
Machine learning-based Score Likelihood Ratios have been proposed as an alternative to traditional Likelihood Ratios and Bayes Factor to quantify the value of evidence when contrasting two opposing propositions. Under the common source problem, the opposing proposition relates to the…
Forensic Analysis on Android Social Networking Applications
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Digital
Published: 2023 | By: Chen Shi
This presentation is from the 75th Anniversary Conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Orlando, Florida, February 13-18, 2023. Posted with permission of CSAFE.
Source Camera Identification on Multi-Camera Phones
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Digital,Forensic Statistics
Published: 2023 | By: Stephanie Reinders
Camera identification addresses the scenario where an investigator has a questioned digital image from an unknown camera. The investigator wants to know whether the questioned image was taken by a camera on a person of interest’s phone. Researchers discovered that…
An Ounce of Prevention: A Simple and Practical Tool for Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Forensic Decisions.
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Implementation and Practice
Published: 2023 | By: Adele Quigley-McBride
Learning Overview: The free information management toolkit described in this presentation will be introduced and attendees will learn to use this toolkit as a training tool and as a practical solution for analysts and laboratories interested in implementing the Linear…
Sampling & Non-Response: Implications for inference in black-box studies
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics,Implementation and Practice
Published: 2023 | By: Kori Khan
The following is from University of California Law San Francisco symposium “Forensic identification in criminal courts,” February 2023. Posted with permission of CSAFE.
Analyzing spatial responses: A comparison of IRT- based approaches
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics,Latent Print
Published: 2023 | By: Amanda Luby
We investigate two approaches for analyzing spatial coordinate responses using models inspired by Item Response Theory (IRT). In the first, we use a two-stage approach to first construct a pseudoresponse matrix using the spatial information and then apply standard IRT…
The Future of Pattern Recognition in Forensic Science
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics,Implementation and Practice
Published: 2023 | By: Alicia Carriquiry
This presentation is from World Police Summit 2023, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, March 7-9, 2023. Posted with permission of CSAFE.
An Overview of the Two-Stage, Score-Based Likelihood Ratio, and Bayes Factor Approaches for Writership Determinations
Type: Presentation Slides Research Area(s): Forensic Statistics,Handwriting
Published: 2023 | By: Danica Ommen
A variety of statistical approaches have been developed at the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE) to address the question of writership for forensic document examinations. Previous work at CSAFE has addressed the closed-set problem, when the…
Judging Firearms Evidence
Type: Publication Research Area(s): Firearms and Toolmarks,Implementation and Practice
Published: 2023 | By: Brandon L. Garrett
Firearms violence results in hundreds of thousands of criminal investigations each year. To try to identify a culprit, firearms examiners seek to link fired shell casings or bullets from crime scene evidence to a particular firearm. The underlying assumption is…
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