#At a glance
- Organisation: Digital Forensic Sciences Australia
- Role: Senior Software Engineer, part-time
- Period: April 2023 to June 2025
- Setting: Operational law-enforcement investigation workflows
- Outcome: A deployed digital-forensics mapping product
#The problem
Investigators often receive sightings and other evidence at different times, in different locations, and from different sources. Each new piece of information can change where a person or vehicle could plausibly have travelled.
The challenge was to turn that growing evidence set into something an investigator could reason about spatially and temporally, without losing sight of how each conclusion had been reached.
#The product
Quintilian Map, or QMAP, is a digital-forensics mapping product designed to connect sightings across time and location. As evidence is added, it helps narrow plausible travel zones and gives investigators a clearer way to explore possible movements.
The product needed to make sophisticated analysis useful inside a practical investigative workflow. Correctness mattered, but so did clarity, security, and the ability for an investigator to understand and work with the result.
#My contribution
I worked alongside Dr Matthew Sorell and Bailey Heading, contributing to the algorithm and analytical approach while leading the product engineering around it.
My responsibilities included:
- Translating analytical concepts into usable product behaviour
- Building the secure end-to-end application
- Integrating the mapping and analytical components
- Designing workflows around how investigators add and assess evidence
- Preparing and deploying the system for operational use
- Working across research, engineering, and user needs as the product evolved
#The difficult part
QMAP was not simply a map with data points. The engineering challenge was connecting specialist analysis to an interface and system that could be used responsibly in a high-consequence environment.
That required close collaboration. Algorithmic ideas had to survive implementation, the software had to preserve the meaning of the underlying analysis, and the workflow had to remain understandable as new evidence changed the possible picture.
#Outcome
The collaboration produced a digital-forensics product that has been deployed and used in real law-enforcement investigations.
For me, the project demonstrated a different kind of end-to-end product development from MATE: taking specialist research and domain expertise, turning it into secure operational software, and working with other experts to make a complex method usable.
#Relevant experience
This work is representative of the projects where I am most useful: technically difficult products that need someone to move between domain experts, algorithms, implementation, deployment, and the people using the final system.