This paper presents an overview of the PAN/CLEF evaluation lab. During the last decade, PAN has been established as the main forum of digital text forensic research. PAN 2016 comprises three shared tasks: (i) author identification, addressing author clustering and diarization (or intrinsic plagiarism detection); (ii) author profiling, addressing age and gender prediction from a crossgenre persp...

DNA fingerprinting is a powerful technology that has revolutionized forensic science. No two individuals can have an identical DNA pattern except identical twins. Such DNA-based technologies have enormous social implications and can help in the fight against crime. This technology has experienced many changes over time with many advancements occurring. DNA testing is a matter of serious concern...

Palynology is a long established and respected branch of environmental science that has been applied to criminal investigation in a meaningful way only in recent years. It has proved to be remarkably versatile in many kinds of criminal enquiry. It is not, however, an absolute science; palynological data are on a par with the suites of symptoms which allow medical practitioners to make diagnoses...

The analysis of short tandem repeat (STR) DNA sequences is of fundamental importance to forensic science because they have become the recognized standard in constructing national public databases. Consequently, considerable effort has been expended in developing multiplexed (one tube) reactions that analyze several loci in combination. The implementation of STRs in casework cannot take place wi...

The paper uses insights from the so-called rape in disguise case study to describe forensic DNA practices in the Netherlands in late 1980s. It describes how “reliabilities” of forensic DNA practices were achieved. One such reliability – convincing evidence – proliferates body parts through time and space. Then, attention shifts to the individual who was suspected of having committed the rape. H...

The rise of DNA evidence to the forefront of forensic science has led to high sample numbers being submitted for profiling by investigators to casework laboratories: bottleneck effects are often seen resulting in slow turnaround times and sample backlog. The ParaDNA(®) Screening and Intelligence Tests have been designed to guide investigators on the viability of potential sources of DNA allowin...

DNA evidence is often presented as the “gold standard” for forensic science. But this was not always the case. For years, eminent scientists complained that the estimates of the tiny frequencies of DNA types were unfounded. It took scores of research papers, dozens of judicial opinions, and two committees of the National Academy of Sciences to resolve the dispute by the mid-1990s. Since 2000, h...

For deciphering the secrets of forensic science, nanotechnology has quite extensively been utilized. Generally, for identifying the fingerprints, a lot of combination of different materials and film assemblies have already been utilized. Since the mode of interaction between the nanoparticles and fingerprint marks, is still not clearly understood, fabricating the nanoparticle assemblies for the...

I n January this year, the Police Department of Columbia, SC, USA, released a wanted poster for an African American man sought as a person of interest (POI) in connection with the murders of a 25-yearold woman and her 3-year-old daughter 3 years ago. It was the first wanted poster of its kind, delivered by CSI on steroids. The police used forensic DNA phenotyping— determining eye and hair colou...

Many forensic genetics problems can be handled using structured systems of discrete variables, for which Bayesian networks offer an appealing practical modelling framework, and allow inferences to be computed by probability propagation methods. However, when standard assumptions are violated for example when allele frequencies are unknown, there is identity by descent or the population is heter...