Episode 105 | Just Putrid Databases

Just Putrid Databases

In episode seven of the 2019 R&D season, Just Science interviews Dr. Audris Mockus, a Professor in the Tickle College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, about an Image Cloud Platform for Use in Tagging and Research on Decomposition database.

Over the last few decades, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Forensic Anthropology Center have been photographing and cataloguing the decomposition of the subjects in their body farm. With help from Dr. Audris Mockus, they’re turning this collection into an image database for both research and forensic investigation. Listen in as Dr. Mockus discusses the database and its potential impact on both post-mortem interval estimation and our understanding of human decomposition.

This episode of Just Science is funded by the National Institute of Justice’s Forensic Technology Center of Excellence [Award 2016-MU-BX-K110].

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Dr. Audris Mockus is the Ericsson-Harlan D. Mills Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Tennessee. His latest interests concern models of the entire open-source software ecosystem based on version-control data and anthropological phenomena hidden in large image collections. He is interested in recovering information and creating models of reality from big operational data. Previously, he worked at Avaya Research, AT&T, and Lucent Bell Labs. He received a PhD in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1994.

Additional Resources:

2019 NIJ R&D Symposium Archival