Name: Dr. Marcel Worring

Education: PhD degree in Computer Science (VU University Amsterdam)

Position at UvA: Lecturer and Track coordinator Forensics

'It is possible that the police find a computer at a crime scene. Most likely, this computer is full of information, consisting of documents, e-mails, programs, images, videos etc. This is the type of information you learn to gather and analyse during the Forensics track. The idea is that as a forensics expert, you can work together with police detectives by giving them the right kind of information,in a way that they can understand. Very often, information on computers found on a crime scence has disappeared or damaged on purpose. The challenge for forensic analysts is to recover (a part of) the hard disk and make information admissible. Important tools for achieving this are internet traffic (what happens on mailservers and between who?) and biometric traces like fingerprints and writing style.' 

'Because of our strong link with the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) and the fact that the systems of our research group are being used by five (inter)national police forces and Interpol, our students get to work on real life cases a lot. For example, at the moment we work on fighting child pornography. One system, that we have already set up in collaboration with a specialized company, has the ability to cut one hour of video in pieces and play it fast-motion. That way you can watch one hour of video in just one minute. In that one minute, a trained detective can register if something illegal is happening in the video. It just saves him a lot of time and prevent him from seeing unpleasant images. It is quite a simple system, but is in use in almost every police force in the Netherlands. We are now working on an advanced version, with which you can search for specific things like indoor scenes, or video containing a lot of nudity as well as finding images by similarity. ' 

'Our research group of about 40 people is one of the world's strongest in this field. Especially in the area of video and image analysis, we have won quite a few international awards. I think the strength of our team lies in the combination of a high level of engineering with a very serious approach to tackle the subject matter. It is about diving into the material and really wanting to understand where things go wrong.The fun thing is that students can profit from this knowledge. During your research projects, you will never work on just a fictive case, it's always linked to actuality.' 

'Cybercrime is growing bigger by the day. In a society with this much data flow, the need for tools to analyze and act upon these developments is becoming more urgent. From banks and insurance companies to police and governments: in all environments where digital forensics plays a role, they need people with the right know-how. Computer forensics is not viewed upon as something you do on the side anymore, it's a professional and essential part of running a successful and safe organization. In a way, a cyber criminal has it easy: he has to concentrate on one illegal act. Organizations or people who are victim of cybercrime have a harder time trying to defend themselves, because they don't know what's coming their way. That's why we need people who know how to do thorough research and know how to document it.'