Boston Chapter of the ASA Evening Lecture by
Professor Karen Kafadar, ASA President
"The Critical Role of Statistics in Evaluating Forensic Evidence"
Date: Monday May 6, 2019
Time: 6:00 pm, social and light dinner; 7 pm, presentation
Location: Science Center, Room 705, Harvard University, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA.
Public Transportation (Recommended): Harvard T station on the Red Line
Parking: Public parking is available in nearby garages. There is typically street parking available around the Science Center as well.
Cost: $8 for students; $15 for BCASA members; $20 for non-members, Presentation only: Free
Registration: http://bcasa2019kafadar.eventbrite.com. Registration requested by May 2.
Note: The election of three BCASA officers for 2020 will take place at 6:50 pm
Abstract:
Statisticians have been valuable contributors to many areas of science, including chemistry (chemometrics), biology (genomics), medicine (clinical trials), and agriculture (crop yield), leading to important advances in statistical research that have benefited multiple fields (e.g., spectral analysis, penalized regression, sequential analysis, experimental design). Statistics in forensic science has not been nearly as extensive, given its importance (ensuring proper administration of justice) and value it has demonstrated thus far (e.g., forensic DNA, assessment of bullet lead evidence, U.S. anthrax investigations, reliability of eyewitness identification). Forensic methods in many areas remain unvalidated, as recent investigations have highlighted (notably, bite marks and hair analysis). I will provide examples where statistics played a vital role in evaluating forensic evidence and suggest further areas where statisticians can make a big impact, towards the ultimate goal of strengthening forensic evidence to achieve its mission: to raise the level of confidence in the reliability of evidence in the criminal justice system.
Speaker Biography:
Karen Kafadar is Chair and Commonwealth Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Virginia. She was Editor of Technometrics (1999–2001), President of the International Association for Statistical Computing (2011–2013), and she currently is Editor-in-Chief of the Annals of Applied Statistics. Karen earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in statistics from Stanford University, both in 1975. She completed her PhD in statistics from Princeton University in 1979 under the supervision of John Tukey; her dissertation was Robust Confidence Intervals for the One- and Two- Sample Problem. Before moving to the University of Virginia in 2014, Karen was Rudy Professor of Statistics at Indiana University. She has also worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Hewlett Packard, the National Cancer Institute, the University of Colorado Denver, and Oregon State University. Karen is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (since 1994) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (2007). She is the current president of the American Statistical Association (ASA), which at present has close to 20,000 members.
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Daniel Rice
Senior Principal Scientist
FAST Labs™, BAE Systems
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