About this course

This course has four goals.

The first is to simply clear away your suspension of disbelief in the sheer number of bad things happening in the real world today. Wake up. Its a different world in terms of human deviousness, which can now be unleashed in fantastic new ways. One thing is a given: in the world of tomorrow, every crime will involve computing and connected devices. And its investigation will involve even more computing machines. The methodology for solving crimes - or forensics - must now be transferred to computing machines, and we need to know how to do this.

Crime, forensics, law-enforcement, security and intelligence are inseparable concepts in today's world. Any foray into one of these fields requires interplay with all of the others. The second goal of this course is to empower you with a sweeping awareness of what these fields entail today, and how they interact. Awareness evokes our natural propensity to rationalize, and eventually brings order and precision into our thought process. To solve crime effectively, or to build technologies to solve crime effectively, you need this.

The third goal of this course is to bring home the fact that the world today is no longer navigable by human experience and lessons learnt through example alone. Too much is happening around us too fast. In a world where all objects (and one day, perhaps, all humans) are slated to have an IP address, the number and types of new crimes that are committed each day is in the hundreds now, and projected to be in the thousands in the near future, by the year 2022! What would crime-solving entail in this scenario? How do you deal with a crime whose imprints you have never seen or imagined before? You may need technology to even know that you are dealing with a new crime, and then may need a whole chain of technologies to understand and reconstruct its features. Awareness, and information, are key to that.

This brings us to the fourth goal of this course: how do we deal with different kinds of information? Trillions of images, quadrillions of documents, the human voice, sounds, multimedia, all of the modalities that record crime, and are used to commit it. Why is there so much information pertinent to each crime today? This course will skim through each modality and highlight the key technologies used to analyze information through it. Eventually you will realize that a new approach to crime solving is needed - that of artificial intelligence. With the amount of information available to connect and wade through, we can no longer depend on human skills alone to outsmart the criminal. We need those powerful machines that can build an aresenal against the criminal's game by assimilating phenomenal amounts of information. That is the cyberforensic expert of the future.

In all these respects, this course is a vista course, and its goal is to help you navigate the world of bad things from a forensic perspective, to find the technologies that can help build those machines of the future.