I don't have a degree, I have 3-4 years experience but part of me thinks on paper (particularly to Asian employers) this wont look as good as a degree.
The alleged crime happened in a foreign and independent country, where they have no choice but to play by the rules of that country. That's why. Non-cooperation just makes it worse, ensuring that nothing at all gets done.
When in-country, Todd's followed the rules. They were in Singapore to collect their son's possessions, and they did that. This saved the Singapore police and/or the landlord from having to sell or throw away those possessions. If there were any way for them to do the police's job of investigating the incident, I'm sure they would have attempted that as well, since clearly the police abdicated that responsibility.
Now they're in the USA, and Singapore's rules no longer apply to them.
The police can do anything with a disk image they could have done with the original disk, except tamper with the evidence. If they still claim to require the original disk, that clearly demonstrates their intentions.
How about tapping into the local universities around you ? Plenty of universities nowadays teach intro-level courses in machine learning. Someone who has gone through such courses would know more than enough to satisfy your needs. I'd love to help, but I'm not based in Amsterdam :)
Failing that, there're always online resources to turn into. I highly recommend this https://class.coursera.org/ml/lecture/preview. This is how I got started with machine learning too. It's not hard to hack together a basic recommendation system quickly ... although for the long term, you might need a dedicated person to work on it since providing good recommendations on favourites seems to be your core value proposition.
