 |
|
FEATURE STORIES |
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced the appointment of 27 experts to the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which will advise the President and the National AI Initiative Office on a range of issues related to artificial intelligence (AI). The appointments are the first for the recently established committee, created in response to the National AI Initiative Act of 2020. The initiative directs the NAIAC to provide recommendations on topics including the current state of U.S. AI competitiveness, the state of science around AI, and AI workforce issues. The committee is also responsible for advice regarding the management and coordination of the initiative itself, including its balance of activities and funding.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published Digital Investigation Techniques: A NIST Scientific Foundation Review. This draft report, which will be open for public comment for 60 days (comments due July 11, 2022), reviews the methods that digital forensic experts use to analyze evidence from computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices. The purpose of NIST scientific foundation reviews is to document and evaluate the scientific basis for forensic methods. These reviews fill a need identified in a landmark 2009 study by the National Academy of Sciences, which found that many forensic disciplines lack a solid foundation in scientific research. To conduct their review, the authors examined peer-reviewed literature, documentation from software developers, test results on forensic tools, standards and best practices documents, and other sources of information. They found that “digital evidence examination rests on a firm foundation based in computer science,” and that “the application of these computer science techniques to digital investigations is sound.”
“Copying data, searching for text strings, finding timestamps on files, reading call logs on a phone. These are basic elements of a digital investigation,” said Barbara Guttman, leader of NIST’s digital forensics research program and an author of the study. “And they all rely on fundamental computer operations that are widely used and well understood.”
|
