Geoforensics and Information Management for crime Investigation (GIMI)

Project Staff - Colin Aitken

Professor Colin Aitken
Professor of Forensic Statistics,
School of Mathematics,
The University of Edinburgh,  King's Buildings,
Mayfield Road,
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ.

Phone: (0)131 650 4877
Fax: (0)131 650 6553
c.g.g.aitken@ed.ac.uk
http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~cgga/

Biography

Colin Aitken is Professor of Forensic Statistics at The University of Edinburgh.  He has a Batchelor's degree in Mathematical Sciences from  The University of Edinburgh, a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics from  The University of Cambridge and a doctorate in Statistics from The  University of Glasgow.  He was a lecturer in Statistics at The  University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, for two years where he collaborated  with members of the Forensic Science Unit (now the Centre of Forensic  Science) and where his interest in matters at the interface of law,  statistics and forensic science was nurtured.  He then moved to The  University of Edinburgh in 1979 where he has been ever since.   He is a  Chartered Statistician, co-author with Professor Franco Taroni of the  School of Criminal Sciences at The University of Lausanne of   'Statistics and the evaluation of evidence for forensic scientists',  chief editor of the journal 'Law, Probability and Risk', and Chairman of  the working group of the Royal Statistical Society on Statistics and the  Law.  He has published many research papers in this area and has acted  as a consultant and expert witness in many criminal investigations.

Publications

• (with F. Taroni  and  S. Bozza, 2005)  Decision analysis in forensic science.  Journal of Forensic Sciences, 50, 894-905.
•  (with D. Lucy, G. Zadora  and J.M. Curran, 2006, to appear) Evaluation  of trace evidence for three-level multivariate data with the use of  graphical models,  Computational Statistics and Data Analysis/./
• Statistics and the Evaluation of Evidence for Forensic Scientists, 2004,.  (2nd edition) John Wiley & Sons Ltd.,530 pp. (with F. Taroni as  second author)
• Bayesian networks in forensic science (2006, to appear).  John Wiley &  Sons Ltd.,  (second of four authors;  others are F. Taroni (1st  author), P. Garbolino and A. Biedermann).