The Diana Initiative 2020

In order to address the massive growth of digital evidence available in criminal investigations, the St. Joseph County (IN) Cyber Crimes Unit began a partnership with the University of Notre Dame in 2015. Unlike any other cyber crimes unit in the country, they took a leap of faith and began employing students as sworn law enforcement personnel and digital forensics examiners. We are two of those investigators. In this role, we conduct digital forensics examinations on real cases, write and execute search warrants, and testify in court. When we are not actively working on a case, we conduct research and testing, looking for novel ways to apply technology and digital forensics to existing real-world problems.

Since the inception of traffic crash reconstruction in 1985, its methods and formulas have remained relatively unchanged. So, we asked: can technology revolutionize traffic crash reconstruction? In this talk, we will discuss research that we have done related to the feasibility of using data automatically collected by a smartphone to reconstruct traffic crashes. We have found that depending on user interaction with the phone, it may be possible to build a detailed timeline of events leading up to, during, and after a crash. This timeline can include not only user interaction with the phone, but also detailed GPS information and vehicle speeds. Finally, we will talk about how our research can address the limitations of existing crash reconstruction methods and show case examples of where we have applied this research to local cases.