Thinking Computationally about ForensicsAnthropological Perspectives on Advancements in Technologies, Data, and Algorithms

While forensic anthropology is often characterized as an applied science, it is deeply rooted in the larger discipline of biological anthropology. As forensic practitioners, we work to extend the theory of, and methods for, the study of human variation to the medicolegal context. We continue, therefore, to address the fundamental questions of topics critical to biological anthropology, such as the degree and distribution of skeletal and genetic diversity and the efffects of environment and life history on morphological expression, just as we seek to infer the demographic parameters of sex, age, and ancestry that allow us to broadly characterize modern peoples. In speaking for the single person, however, forensic anthropologists are uniquely challenged with the issue of scale. We must distill our approaches (or methods) of biological anthropology for the detection and documentation of populational trends to the level of the individual forensic case as we reconstruct the biological profile and address the personal identity concerns that dominate the forensic anthropological analysis of unknown human remains. In concert with this change in scope, forensic anthropologists must also contend with a refocusing of perspective toward the investigative and judicial system. At once, we are expected to respond to the dynamic needs of individual identification in the service of human rights, social justice, and the medicolegal community, the increasing demands for scientific rigor in case analysis and reporting, and the changing expectations for admissible evidence and expert testimony in the courtroom (Christensen and Crowder 2009; Grivas and Komar 2008; Lesciotto 2015; Steadman 2009; Steadman et al. 2006; Wiersema et al. 2009).

Not surprisingly, the field of forensic anthropology has evolved considerably over the last half-century. The present state of the discipline is very diffferent from when it was first admitted into the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) as the "physical anthropology" section in 1972, yet there are interesting and important parallel moments in its developmental trajectory. A decade later, Snow (1982: 97) wrote about the new expansion of physical anthropology into the area of forensics "at a time when many physical anthropologists are deeply concerned with the need to expand the scope of our field beyond its traditional boundaries." Similarly, we are writing here about how forensic anthropology is presently undergoing its own transformation, as it expands its reach to adopt methods that once would have been outside the limits of the forensic anthropologist's traditional expertise. The field therefore stands at the crossroads of diverse areas of study beyond skeletal variation, overlapping with computational biology, genetics, isotopes, and demography, and cultural anthropology (Algee-Hewitt et al. 2018; Hughes et al. 2017). This point is most obviously supported by the amendment of its AAFS section title in 2013 to the more inclusive "Anthropology." This change was equally borne out by the trends observed in publications specific to forensic anthropology. From a Web of Science analysis of the publications of the Journal of Forensic Science, when filtered for anthropology as research area and constrained to the roughly five-year period of 2013–2018, we found that the titles of the top 10 cited papers explicitly address the computational topics of advanced statistics, classification algorithms, and imaging methods and speak to the biosocial issues of racial and ancestral identity for peoples of multiple origins with complex population histories (Christensen et al. 2014; Crowder et al. 2013; Edgar 2013; Hackman and Black 2013; Hauther et al. 2015; Hefner and Ousley 2014; Kim et al. 2013; Stephan 2014; Stephan et al. 2013; Tise et al. 2013). Moreover, in these studies we see more multicomponent frameworks that embrace the technological advances in complementary, computationally driven fields and a recognition of the potential value of computational approaches to the forensic anthropologist's applied work, whether in aid of law enforcement or in large-scale responses to humanitarian crises, human right violations, or mass disasters. This movement in forensic anthropology represents swift and major progress forward.

This shift in our research priorities...