Earlier this month, Kevin and I attended the 2nd European IABPA conference in Zürich, Switzerland.

This conference saw about 140 participants from 23 countries and was quite an interesting one. The main organizers – Sabine Hess and Andreas Schweizer [both of the Wissenschaftlicher Dienst, Zürich, Switzerland] – did a fantastic job of keeping things on track and running smoothly. Silke Brodbeck [Blutspureninstitut, Germany] did a great job organizing the talks.

There were a few interesting talks on crime scene reconstruction, several talks which generated interesting evening discussions, and presentations on the state of bloodstain pattern analysis in France and Canada. The Complex Bloodstain Patterns workshop by Brian Allen [Ontario Police College, Canada] was particularly useful to me as it helped me put our work with HemoSpat into context.

It was great to meet with licensees face-to-face and discuss potential improvements to HemoSpat, and to hear HemoSpat mentioned in several of the talks. We also were fortunate [?] enough to participate as members of the “Vineyard Escape Team” on the night of the banquet. Sadly one member of the team was injured and required surgery to his arm.

After the conference, Kevin and I were fortunate enough to be invited by Martin Eversdijk [Forensic Police Amsterdam-Amstelland, The Netherlands] to tour their new forensics labs in Amsterdam, and by Martin Roos [Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Netherlands] to tour the NFI building in The Hague. These tours were very interesting as we got to see different aspects of forensic services in The Netherlands. [Thanks also to Dennis Boon of the NFI for the tour and to Jos Klemm and Ger Coolen of the Regio Politie Limburg-Zuid for the lift to Maastricht!]

See you in Boulder, Colorado, USA!

FORident Software is pleased to announce the release of HemoSpat v1.1 for Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows 2000/XP. The biggest change in this version is the addition of the 2D Viewer. This gives you top, side, and front views of the scene so you may verify that the virtual strings for each pattern look correct.

There are a few other changes and fixes as well. For a complete list of changes, please see the release notes.

We look forward to working with you!

This week I attended the annual IABPA training conference in Corning, NY, USA.

As with last year’s conference in Santa Barbara, there was quite a large group from Europe in attendance and an especially large group from The Netherlands. It was nice to see so many familiar faces and great to meet new people and to put faces to names.

I learned quite a bit at this conference – how nasty hotel rooms can be, similarities between dismembered body disposal methods in London and Dublin, how far you can walk after taking a power saw to your own throat, how to bury the hatchet, and more mundane things like information about the IABPA itself and the relationship with the Scientific Working Group on Bloodstain Pattern Analysis (SWGSTAIN). It was also great to see the amount of interest in HemoSpat amongst the attendees.

Thank you everyone for your input on the project and I look forward to working with you!

The August 2006 issue of Law Enforcement Technology Magazine has an article in it about HemoSpat. It gives a bit of insight into Andy’s background and motivation for writing HemoSpat, as well as highlighting its features.

You can read the article at officer.com.

FORident Software is pleased to announce that HemoSpat v1.0 is now available for Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows 2000/XP!

You can find out the details on our pricing & ordering page.

We look forward to working with you!