Co-advisor
+Heike Hofmann
++ Professor of Statistics at Iowa State and long-time collaborator on the bullet-matching + methodology and the downstream R tooling. +
++ + Iowa State University · 2012 — 2017 · Statistics & Computer Science +
+ ++ My dissertation replaced a firearms examiner's judgement call through a comparison microscope with + an open, end-to-end statistical pipeline operating on 3D surface scans. The resulting methods, + software, and publications are now part of the + CSAFE research program and have been cited in + the ongoing debate over the scientific foundation of pattern-matching forensic disciplines. +
+ + + + ++ When a bullet is fired, the barrel leaves fine striations on its surface — tool marks + that are, in principle, characteristic of that barrel. Traditional firearms identification + asks a human examiner to look through a comparison microscope and decide whether two bullets + match. The decision is binary, the rationale is verbal, and the error rate has historically + been opaque. +
++ The 2009 NAS report and 2016 PCAST report both singled out + pattern-matching forensic disciplines for lacking empirical foundations. You cannot argue + about error rates on a method until the method is written down precisely enough to run twice. + My dissertation set out to write it down. +
++ {step.detail} +
++ Two signatures overlaid. Peaks and valleys align where the same barrel feature scored both + bullets — the cross-correlation between them is what the classifier ultimately turns + into a match probability. +
+{c.body}
+ + ))} +{p.data.venue}
+ {p.data.award && ( +
+
{p.data.abstract}
+ )} + {p.data.doi && ( ++ doi: {p.data.doi} +
+ )} +{t.y}
+{t.t}
+Co-advisor
++ Professor of Statistics at Iowa State and long-time collaborator on the bullet-matching + methodology and the downstream R tooling. +
+Co-advisor
++ Distinguished Professor and founding director of CSAFE — the Center for Statistics and + Applications in Forensic Evidence. +
+Research home
++ NIST Center of Excellence. The bullet-matching work continues there under the + BulletAnalyzr umbrella. +
++ Still interested? +
++ If you're working on pattern-matching evidence, reproducible pipelines, or the R tooling + around any of it — I still follow this space. +
+ +