Expert Bytes ― Computer Expertise in Forensic Documents - Players, Needs, Resources and Pitfalls

"1 Book framework Purpose -- The purpose of this book is to introduce computer scientists to the field of forensic documents (FD), also known as questioned documents, and assist them with the design of research projects in this area. It unveils the socio-technological landscape in which the scientist will evolve: players, needs, resources, pitfalls. However, it is not a step-by-step recipe on how to expertise documents or write automation software, not does it teach how to become a good project manager -other books exist for those purposes. While maintaining a global perspective on FD, the focus is on a specific topic, writing in all its forms (handwriting, signature, printing...), where visuality plays a greater role than it has for the expertise of implements (pen, ink, paper...). On the computing side the book is rooted in the field of document image analysis. Readership -- It is assumed that the reader has little or no previous exposure to FD. While primarily addressing academic and commercial sector researchers, computing graduate and post-graduate students, the publication is also useful to forensic practitioners in order to know what to ask and expect from computer scientists. Incidentally it also profitable to paleographers, whose field, close to FD, exhibits similarities in its relationship with digital technologies.1 Project managers and policy-makers in information technology and forensics will benefit from the description of the sociological landscape shaping the technologies whose birth they are mandated to facilitate. The same description is equally interesting to sociologists of science and technology"--

Vlad Atanasiu holds a PhD in Arabic paleography from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and studied cognitive sciences as a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wrote a book on statistical aspects of calligraphy. As coordinator of the European project "Bernstein" at the Austrian Academy of Sciences he developed image processing and geographical information software for the analysis and history of paper. For ParisTech Telecom, Paris, he did research on writer identification. Presently he is teaching information visualization and studying for his second PhD, in the computer science field of document engineering, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.