Drs. Andrew Smith and Gary Wells receive a National Science Foundation grant.

Congratulations to Drs. Andrew Smith (PI) and Gary Wells (Co-PI) for receiving a National Science Foundation grant ($388,877) for their research titled “Video-Recordings of Eyewitness Identification in Actual Cases: The Postdictive Value of Eyewitness Behaviors”.

Project Summary: Over the next three years the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office will send Drs. Smith and Wells videos of eyewitnesses as they complete lineup identification procedures. Blind coders will score the behaviors of the witnesses who appear in these videos and we will then use a machine learning algorithm to examine the extent to which these behaviors can be used to distinguish between lineups that include a guilty suspect and lineups that include an innocent suspect. The grant is active from 2020 – 2023. More information about Drs. Smith’s and Wells’ research can be found here.