Artificial intelligence in Forensic Biometrics: the two sides of the medal

Dr. Prof. Didier Meuwly

Netherlands Forensic Institute and University of Twente

Resumen/Abstract

The forensic process supports several forensic biometric applications: intelligence, investigation and evaluation in court. It aims at answering forensic questions about the source of biometric items and about the reconstruction of activities (e.g. type, location, time and sequence) involving biometric items. Concretely the process consists in examining (i.e. recovering, analysing and interpreting) biometric items, and in answering the questions by reporting the observations made and the opinions formulated. The rapid development and widespread use artificial intelligence in the society also affects forensic biometrics. This keynote lecture presents the generative (GenAI) and discriminative (DisAI) applications derived from artificial intelligence models that are playing a role in forensic biometrics. On one side it explains the use of GenAI to produce artificial forensic biometric items (e,g. morphing, deepfakes). On the other side, it describes the use of GenAI and DisAI in the recovery, analysis, interpretation and reporting steps of the forensic biometrics process. Finally it explores the accountability requirements for a forensic biometric process embedding GenAI and DisAI, from a scientific, legal, and societal perspective.

Curriculum ponente

Didier Meuwly was born in Fribourg, Switzerland. After a classical education in Latin and philosophy, he graduated in criminalistics and criminology in 1993 and received his PhD in 2000 from the School for Forensic Science (ESC) at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He currently divides his time between the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), where he is a principal scientist at the Forensic Institute of the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, and the University of Twente (UT), where he has held the Chair of Forensic Biometrics since 2013. He specialises in the automation and validation of the probabilistic evaluation of forensic evidence, particularly biometric traces. From 2002 to 2004, he worked as a senior forensic scientist in the Research and Development Department of the UK Forensic Science Service (FSS), then an executive agency of the UK Ministry of the Interior. Didier has served as a criminalist in several international terrorism case reviews at the request of the ICTY, STL, UN, UK and Switzerland. He has authored and co-authored more than 60 scientific publications and book chapters in the field of forensic science. He is an associate and guest editor of Forensic Science International (FSI), a member of the Research and Development Standing Committee of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI), and a member of ISO Technical Committee 272, which developed the first ISO forensic science standard (21043). He received the ENFSI Distinguished Forensic Scientist Award in 2022.