The Davin Teo talk on Digital Forensics was a TEDx talk that made me interested in how he got to this point, and the intersection between his career and the social sciences. Davin’s career in digital forensics started out in computer science, but it was his knowledge of human behaviour and social effects that really set him apart.

Digital forensics isn’t only about technical knowledge on how to recover digital evidence, but the reality of what happens when hackers do. This requires a more sophisticated understanding of social behavior, motivations, and wider societal consequences of digital behaviour. Davin said that the need for digital forensics researchers to be detectives as well as psychologists is to understand the how and why behind cyber attacks.

This talk was an affirmation that interdisciplinary expertise is key to it. Social science gives us patterns of behaviour, culture and psychology that we need to understand digital data to make sense of it. For example, when investigators understand how cyberbullying operates among groups, like communities that are not represented, they can develop better prevention and intervention strategies.

In sum, Davin Teo’s career path shows how central the social sciences are to digital forensics. And it’s a reminder that technology and human behavior have much to do with each other and professionals in the field have to master both to beat cybercrime.