The Third European Academy of Forensic Science Meeting is less than 100 days away. We have passed the deadlines for abstract submission and early registration and now it is all hands on deck for the final preparations.

In that light, we are very excited that our colleague José Antonio Lorente Acosta has agreed to attend the meeting and to speak at our Academy-wide luncheon, which is scheduled to take place on Friday September 26.

Mr. Lorente Acosta is the Director of the Laboratory of Genetic Identification at the Department of Legal Medicine of the University of Granada, Spain. Recently he has made the news in an unusual but very interesting case of genetic identification.

Christopher Columbus

Mr. Lorente Acosta and his team are in charge of the investigation, which hopes to establish where the famous explorer Christopher Columbus is really buried. The Dominican Republic and Spain both claim to have the remains of the first European to discover America and last year a Spanish team headed by Mr. Lorente Acosta proposed to resolve the dispute by submitting both sets to DNA tests along with the remains of Columbus's son.

"The aim is to realize an exhaustive, anthropological, mineralogical, odontologic and radiographic analysis and then proceed to DNA testing for identification,"
Mr. Lorente Acosta explains. For more information, and a look behind the scenes, please join us at our luncheon on Friday, September 26.

We would also like to draw your attention to the special benefits Turkish Airlines is offering. As the official carrier of the congress, they give up to 50% discount on your flight to Istanbul. All you have to do is to go to a Turkish Airlines sales office and present your Meeting reconfirmation letter along with the booking code: DD 278.

Have a great summer!

September 23, 2003

Description: Elizabeth Groff and Jochen Albrecht (Department of Geography, University of Maryland, College Park, USA) will present this intensive workshop to explore fundamentals of dynamic analysis of spatial, temporal, and behavioral attributes of crime data.

Elizabeth Groff, an Information Technology Specialist, has over 10 years of experience working with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). She has spent the last 7 years of her career applying spatial analysis techniques to criminal justice issues. She initiated the use of GIS in the Research and Planning Bureau of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department during the mid-1990s and gained national level experience while working at the National Institute of Justice's Crime Mapping Research Center, where she promoted the use of analytic mapping in criminal justice agencies. She has extensive experience in developing and delivering GIS and criminal justice training.

Jochen Albrecht's research interests include theoretical issues in geographical information science (GIS), landscape ecology, and formalization of conceptual geographical models. He has made more than 35 conference presentations and invited lectures, and is the author of more than 15 journal articles, book chapters and invited papers. Among his awards and honors are the Intergraph University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Young Scholars Award and the National Science Foundation /European Science Foundation (NSF/ESF) International Young Scholar in Geographic Information, Summer Institute in Berlin.

Unlike static techniques, which approach the crime problem as a whole, dynamic methods focus on the changes and variations between events, enabling the analyst to perform prediction of future events as well as retrospection of previous events that exceed the bounds of what the information available in the series itself.

The workshop will begin with a brief, empirical review of terminology, and a quick introduction to the different types of spatio-temporal distributions of serial crime events and how they can be visualized and modeled in a desktop computer environment. More hands-on examples will illustrate classical spatial methods and geo-statistical methods such as point pattern and hotspot analysis. On the temporal side, participants will start off with simple sequencing techniques, followed by the analysis of the direction and distribution of movements. Target analysis and the detection of spatial relationships assist in the evaluation of behavioral patterns.

September 22, 2003.

Description: This workshop consists of two parts:

1. Characterising the Science of Forensic Handwriting and Signature Examinations: The Links Between Handwriting Behaviour and Identification Evidence. The Forensic Expertise Profiling Laboratory (FEPL) provides research programs aimed at characterising skill associated with forensic practitioners' perceptual and cognitive processes. Forensic Document Examiners (FDEs) use these processes almost exclusively when determining the authorship of questioned writings. In spite of the routine use of handwriting evidence in courts of law internationally, the nature of the expertise and the theoretical claims made by the community of FDEs, until recent times, has remained almost devoid of programs that assist in the assessment of the validity of the science and its underlying theories, including the elucidation of potential error rates. This has lead to significant criticisms of the field, particularly in the USA, which have been widely reported in the forensic literature. To date over 50,000 blind trial opinions have been collectively expressed by participants from 9 countries on handwriting and signature tasks. The data collected thus far has resulted in numerical insights into facets of FDEs' skills (such as estimates of potential error for differing levels of opinion and the determination of the probative value of opinions regarding different questioned writing types. In addition the program has provided an experimental platform where aspects of the underlying theories of Forensic Handwriting Identification and FDEs' behaviour can be investigated. Examples of these investigations are testing class/individual and complexity theories, the determination of the effect of forger practice on the validity of FDEs' opinions, the impact of FDEs examining original versus photocopied writings and the assessment by FDEs of relative writing speed. This presentation will provide an insight into the relationship between motor control theory and handwriting identification. Information will also be provided regarding the expertise profiling program including the experimental procedures, the revision and corrective action approach to assist in skill development and monitoring, and the impact of the results on method and reporting procedures.

Presenter: Bryan Found (BSc DipEd GradDipNeurosci PhD RFP, Forensic Expertise Profiling Laboratory, School of Human Biosciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victioria, Australia and Document Examination Team, Applied Science Branch, Victoria Forensic Science Centre, Macleod, Victoria, Australia)

2. Handwriting of Siblings: This workshop will look at the handwriting of closely related individuals to determine whether those writings are more similar to one another than the writings of unrelated people. The workshop is focussed on practical examples of such writings and participants will gain experience of examining such samples.

Presenter: Anthony Stockton (Forensic Science Service, Wetherby Forensic Science Laboratory, United Kingdom).