Thursday May 5 Green Auditorium Friday May 6 Portrait Room

0830	Registration + Continental Breakfast 0800	Registration

0900 Welcome introduction, goals, logistics 0830	Review of day 1, polls, question	and	answer

0840	“Forensic DNA Evidence	Interpretation”,

Institute of Standards and Technology

John Buckleton,	National

0930	“Perspectives	and Challenges	from NIST Involvement

Butler,	National Institute of Standards and Technology

in Forensic	Science”, John 0925:	“Quantitative Firearms and	Toolmark	Analysis: New Developments

Software”, Nicholas Petraco, John Jay College of	Criminal	Justice

and	

1015	Break 1000	Break

1045	“The

Penn	State

'Weight

Law

of Evidence' in	Law, Statistics, and Forensic Science”, David Kaye,	 1030 “A new paradigm for forensic science and	its implementation	in	forensic

voice	comparison”, Geoffrey Stewart Morrison, Morrison & Enzinger,

Independent	Forensic Consultants

1130	– “What is probability”, Jim Wayman,	San Jose	State	University 1115	Discussion Moderator: Joe Campbell, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

1200 Lunch	(on your own) 1200	Lunch	(on	your own)

1330 “Evaluating and reporting forensic evidence using the

challenges” Marjan Sjerps:	Netherland	Forensic	Institute

LR framework: statistical 1330 Panel on Similarity	based	LR models,

Chair: Cedric Neumann,	South	Dakota	State	University

Panelists: Doug Armstrong, Marjan Sjerps , Hal Stern, Steve Lund

1400 Discussion

1430 Break 1500	Break

1500 JoAnn Buscaglia:	FBI	(tentative) 1530 Panel on	LR Confidence interval,		

Chair: Chris Saunders,	South	Dakota	State	University

1530 “Integrating Probabilistic	Logic	and Quantitative Data into Panelists: Danica Ommen, Marjan Sjerps ,	Hal	Stern,	Hari Iyer

Practice: Latent Print Examination”, Henry Swofford U.S.	Army

Laboratory

	Criminal	Investigation

1600	Discussion.	Moderator Bill Thompson,	UC Irvine 1700	Wrap up

1730	Adjourn 1730 Adjourn
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Panel on similarity based likelihood ratio 

Chair: Cedric Neumann, South Dakota State University 

Panelists: 

* Doug Armstrong, South Dakota State University 

* Marjan Sjerps, Netherland Forensic Institute 

* Hal Stern, University of California at Irvine/CSAFE 

* Steven Lund, National Institute of Standards and Technology 

The legal and scientific push towards the statistical quantification of the weight of forensic evidence is impeded by the complexity the various 

evidence types encountered on crime scenes. Complex forms of forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, tool marks, shoe prints or chemical profiles 

often live in high dimensional and heterogenous spaces. The need to reduce the complexity of the models has resulted in the apparition of a series of 

ad-hoc measures of the probative value of some forms of forensic evidence, which rely, by proxy, on the level of similarity (or score) between pairs of 

objects, instead of being directly based on sets of measurements of these objects. The appropriateness of these ad-hoc methods has been challenged at 

several occasions. The challenges are based on the argument that these methods do not address the questions of interest to forensic scientists and 

courts, and do not provide a coherent (in the statistical sense) way of updating prior information in a Bayesian framework. Proponents of these 

methods have made the argument that since probabilities are inherently subjective (or personal), the probative values calculated by these methods 

were merely an expression of the personal weight assigned by the forensic scientist to the evidence, and therefore were acceptable. The aim of this 

panel is to discuss the appropriateness of score-based methods as a mean to quantify and report the weight of forensic evidence, and the place of these 

methods in a coherent Bayesian paradigm. 

Panel on the use of interval quantifications for the value of forensic evidence 

Chair: Chris Saunders, South Dakota state university 

Panelists: 

* Danica Ommen, South Dakota State University 

* Hari Iyer, National Institute of Standards and Technology 

* Marjan Sjerps, Netherland Forensic Institute 

* Hal Stern, University of California at Irvine/CSAFE 

At the 2012 ENFSI meeting, Ivo Alberink and James Curran proposed an interval quantification of the value of evidence. This led to a lively 

discussion on the reasonableness of these intervals for the logical and coherent interpretation of forensic evidence. Geoffrey Morrison arranged for a 

series of short presentations on this issue at the 2015 ENFSI meeting. This resulted in a series of papers published in Law, Probability, and Risk 

arguing the validity of using these intervals in the formal subjective Bayesian paradigm for evidence interpretation. It appears that the two groups 

arguing for and against the use of intervals are talking past each other, with one group taking a frequentist stance (or the likelihood paradigm of 

Edwards and Royall) and the other taking a completely subjective Bayesian view. This panel will be focused on discussing the possibility of and 

developing a common foundation among the participants to be able to discuss what an interval estimate of the likelihood ratio actually means and its 

relationship to the formal value of evidence as characterized by the Bayes Factor.