Join the Edinbugh local group for their Annual General Meeting (AGM), as well as two guest speakers on the topic of law and justice within statistics.
Join the Edinbugh local group for their Annual General Meeting (AGM), as well as two guest speakers on the topic of law and justice within statistics.
For the first part of the event, the AGM will be held. This is an opportunity to hear what the RSS Edinburgh local group has achieved this year regarding events and engagement. Those who are members will then be invited to vote for the following years' committee. We are always interested in people joining the committee and getting involved: if you would like to, please get in touch with the chair Tess Vernon (tess.vernon@bioss.ac.uk).
Following this we will hear from two speakers on the topic of law and justice and how statistics can be used in this field:
Talk 1: The evolution of fingerprint evaluative opinions: embracing the modern paradigm
Ruoyun Hui, The Alan Turing Institute
Ruoyun will focus on her work with fingerprint experts to change their categorical reporting scheme towards a more probabilistic one, and will be sharing the practitioners’ feedback from the initial trial.
Talk 2: Advanced statistical reasoning about mixed DNA profiles
Therese Graversen, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
In 2014, Therese presented with co-authors a discussion paper(*) in the RSS on statistical evaluation of mixed DNA profiles. Her associated R package DNAmixtures has, since then, been used for statistical evaluation of mixed DNA profiles in criminal cases both in Denmark and in the United Kingdom, and statistical advances such as these have generally allowed more complex mixed profiles to be used as evidence in court. She will demonstrate how she has used statistical reasoning in witness statements to argue the reliability of the stated likelihood ratio, in particular through various methods for checking the applicability of the probabilistic genotyping model.
*Analysis of forensic DNA mixtures with artefacts.
Robert G. Cowell, Therese Graversen, Steffen Lauritzen, and Julia Mortera
JRSS C. Volume 64, Issue 1, 1-48, 2015
Ruoyun Hui, The Alan Turing Institute
Therese Graversen, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark