Nasir Memon

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Nasir Memon
Education Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical Engineering and Master of Science in Mathematics University of Nebraska, Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science
Known forCenter for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy, founder
Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) Conference, founder
Digital Assembly, founder
Awards SPIE Fellow 2014,
IEEE Fellow 2010,
Best Paper Award: IEEE Signal Processing Society,
Jacobs Excellence in Education Award, Polytechnic University, 2002
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Institutions New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering

Nasir Memon is a computer scientist based in Brooklyn, New York. [1] Memon is a professor and chair of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering computer science and engineering department and affiliate faculty at the computer science department in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. [2] He is also the Department Head of NYU Tandon Online, the online learning unit of the school. He introduced cyber security studies to New York University Tandon School of Engineering, making it one of the first schools to implement the program at the undergraduate level. [1] [2] Memon holds twelve patents in image compression and security. [1] [2] He is the founding director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy (CRISSP) and CRISSP Abu Dhabi. [1] In 2002, Memon founded Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), an annual conference where tens of thousands of students compete in events and learn skills in cyber security [3] Memon is also co-founder of Digital Assembly, a software company that develops digital forensics and data recovery and Vivic, a company that produces malware detection software. [4] [5] Memon has published over 250 articles in journals and conferences and has contributed to articles regarding cyber security in magazines such as Crain’s New York Business , Fortune , and USA Today . [6] [7] [8] [9] His research has been featured in NBC Nightly News , The New York Times , MIT Review , Wired.Com , and New Science Magazine. [6]

Contents

Education

In 1982, Memon graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, with a Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical Engineering and a Master of Science in Mathematics. He graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska in 1992. [1]

Research

Digital forensics

In the 1990s, Memon learned from law enforcement that there was a need for technology that could recover fragmented data. He and his colleagues researched the problem with files and digital photos and were able to develop a solution. [10] Memon developed an automated software program that can retrieve and reassemble fragmented digital photographs, even when the directions for locating them have been deleted. [6] His software is an example of file carving, which is the restoring of file contents after identifying information has been removed or lost.

In 2006, Memon and two of his students, Pasha Pal and Kulesh Shanmugasundaram founded Digital Assembly, which sells a consumer version of the software, Adroit Photo Recovery, to restore deleted images. [6] [11] Digital Assembly has competed and won the NSF Phase I and Phase II SBIRs as well as an NYSTAR TTIP grant. [11] Digital Assembly's software was featured in an ABC news article regarding the use of technology in the fight against child pornography in 2010. [12]

Biometrics and human behavior

In 2011, Memon led a project to develop gesture based alternatives to passwords on touch screen devices. The project demonstrated that the owners of a device can be authenticated by the unique touch of their fingers to either supplement or remove the need for a password [13] He created iSignOn, an app sold in Apple's App Store that uses the motion of a person's actual written signature to authenticate him or her. [14] The app is able to distinguish the user's pattern from forgers after the user signs the screen with their finger five times. [14]

Network security and steganography

In 2005, Memon was featured in the NBC investigative report on terror alerts raised due to bogus analysis. [15] He discussed the art of secret writing called steganography, which allows two parties to communicate with each other without others knowing they are communicating, and how steganalysis software can be used to locate those hidden messages, but it is not always reliable. [15]

In 2009, Memon developed INFER,a network-based infection detection system to identify compromised host computers on large networks primarily for corporate and government systems. [5] This program focuses on detecting systems inside the network infected by malware rather than detection or prevention at the point of entry. INFER was used to track the behavior of 3,000 PCs on The Polytechnic Institute of NYU network. Memon and his students started a company called Vivic to commercialize INFER, which resulted in the U.S. Army Research Laboratory becoming their first paying customer. INFER also has Westchester County, New York government, and the New York City IT Department as customers. [5]

Lossless compression

In 1995, Memon co-developed the novel context based lossless compression scheme named CALIC with Xialoin Wu. CALIC ranked first in the evaluations conducted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) of the techniques submitted in response to its call for a new lossless image compression standard. [16] The final ISO standard, JPEG-LS, was significantly influenced by the concepts utilized in CALIC. [17]

Other activities

Memon created the Information Systems and Internet Security lab, a hackerspace for students to work both on cyber offense and defense. [2] He is the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Security and Forensics. [6] Memon has also been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, the Journal of Electronic Imaging , the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal, the LNCS Transaction on Data Hiding, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and the International Journal on Network Security. [6]

Recognition

Memon has received several awards for his research and lectureship. [18] In 2002, he received the Jacobs Excellence in Education Award from Polytechnic University. [1] In 2010, he became an IEEE Fellow and received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer award for 2011–2012. [1] Memon became a SPIE Fellow in 2014 and was awarded Best Research in Advanced ID Systems: Online Authentication of Digital Signature through Mobile Phones in 2014. [1] He has won best paper awards from IEEE and the Digital Forensics Research Conference. [18] Memon was recognized for his research with the NSF CAREER Award and the Emirates ID Best Research in Advanced ID Systems. [18]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy. No information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information. Typically, a device that performs data compression is referred to as an encoder, and one that performs the reversal of the process (decompression) as a decoder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lossy compression</span> Data compression approach that reduces data size while discarding or changing some of it

In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storing, handling, and transmitting content. The different versions of the photo of the cat on this page show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression which does not degrade the data. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is much higher than using lossless techniques.

Steganography is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the information is not evident to human inspection. In computing/electronic contexts, a computer file, message, image, or video is concealed within another file, message, image, or video. The word steganography comes from Greek steganographia, which combines the words steganós, meaning "covered or concealed", and -graphia meaning "writing".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Image compression</span> Reduction of image size to save storage and transmission costs

Image compression is a type of data compression applied to digital images, to reduce their cost for storage or transmission. Algorithms may take advantage of visual perception and the statistical properties of image data to provide superior results compared with generic data compression methods which are used for other digital data.

A discrete cosine transform (DCT) expresses a finite sequence of data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies. The DCT, first proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972, is a widely used transformation technique in signal processing and data compression. It is used in most digital media, including digital images, digital video, digital audio, digital television, digital radio, and speech coding. DCTs are also important to numerous other applications in science and engineering, such as digital signal processing, telecommunication devices, reducing network bandwidth usage, and spectral methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations.

A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal. "Watermarking" is the process of hiding digital information in a carrier signal; the hidden information should, but does not need to, contain a relation to the carrier signal. Digital watermarks may be used to verify the authenticity or integrity of the carrier signal or to show the identity of its owners. It is prominently used for tracing copyright infringements and for banknote authentication.

Lossless JPEG is a 1993 addition to JPEG standard by the Joint Photographic Experts Group to enable lossless compression. However, the term may also be used to refer to all lossless compression schemes developed by the group, including JPEG 2000 and JPEG-LS.

JPEG XR is an image compression standard for continuous tone photographic images, based on the HD Photo specifications that Microsoft originally developed and patented. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.

Ali Naci Akansu is a Turkish-American Professor of electrical & computer engineering and scientist in applied mathematics.

A video coding format is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital video content. It typically uses a standardized video compression algorithm, most commonly based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding and motion compensation. A specific software, firmware, or hardware implementation capable of compression or decompression to/from a specific video coding format is called a video codec.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nasir Ahmed (engineer)</span> Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist

Nasir Ahmed is an Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of New Mexico (UNM). He is best known for inventing the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in the early 1970s. The DCT is the most widely used data compression transformation, the basis for most digital media standards and commonly used in digital signal processing. He also described the discrete sine transform (DST), which is related to the DCT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NYU Tandon Online</span>

NYU Tandon Online, formerly known as NYU-ePoly, is the online learning department at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, a noted school of engineering, technology, management and applied sciences in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audio coding format</span> Digitally coded format for audio signals

An audio coding format is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital audio. Examples of audio coding formats include MP3, AAC, Vorbis, FLAC, and Opus. A specific software or hardware implementation capable of audio compression and decompression to/from a specific audio coding format is called an audio codec; an example of an audio codec is LAME, which is one of several different codecs which implements encoding and decoding audio in the MP3 audio coding format in software.

Ramesh Karri is a researcher specializing in trustworthy hardware, high assurance nanoscale integrated circuits, architectures and systems. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering. Additionally, Karri is the co-founder of Trust-Hub, Embedded Security Challenge and NYU CRISSP center, the IEEE/ACM Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Nanoscale Architectures. He is a member of NYU WIRELESS. He was awarded the Humboldt Fellowship and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Justin Cappos is a computer scientist and cybersecurity expert whose data-security software has been adopted by a number of widely used open-source projects. His research centers on software update systems, security, and virtualization, with a focus on real-world security problems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony TS Ho</span> British computer scientist

Prof. Anthony TS Ho (何东旋教授) FIET, FInstP, FBCS, CEng, CPhys is a British computer scientist and Professor of Multimedia Security at the University of Surrey.

William "Chuck" Easttom II is an American computer scientist specializing in cyber security, cryptography, quantum computing, and systems engineering.

A copy detection pattern (CDP) or graphical code is a small random or pseudo-random digital image which is printed on documents, labels or products for counterfeit detection. Authentication is made by scanning the printed CDP using an image scanner or mobile phone camera. It is possible to store additional product-specific data into the CDP that will be decoded during the scanning process. A CDP can also be inserted into a 2D barcode to facilitate smartphone authentication and to connect with traceability data.

Nancy Rose Mead is an American computer scientist. She is known for her contributions to security, software engineering education and requirements.

Ibrahim "Abe" Moussa Baggili is a cybersecurity and digital forensics scientist at Louisiana State University with a joint appointment between the college of engineering and the Center for Computation and Technology. Before that, he was the founder and director of the Connecticut Institute of Technology (CIT) at the University of New Haven. Baggili was also a full professor and Elder Family Endowed Chair at UNewHaven. He has a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Technology from Purdue University's Purdue Polytechnic Institute. Baggili is a Jordanian/Arab American first generation college graduate and a well-known scientist in the domain of Cyber Forensics and Cybersecurity with seminal peer-reviewed work in the areas of Virtual Reality Forensics (VR) and security, mobile device forensics and security, application forensics, drone forensics and memory forensics.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Nasir Memon". NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Brady Dale (August 18, 2014). "Spy U: NYU Poly a rare 3-for-3 on NSA Centers of Excellence". Technically Media. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  3. ↑ Dian Schaffhauser. "Student competitors face off at NYU-Poly cyber security week". Campus Technology. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  4. ↑ Foss, Lene (2015). The Entrepreneurial University: Context and Institutional Change.
  5. 1 2 3 Carolyn Duffy Marsan (June 5, 2009). "CIOs: Your networks have already been compromised". Macworld. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Boston area alumni dinner with professor Nasir Memon". Cable. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  7. ↑ Aaron Elstein (May 2015). "New York City's newest rock stars: the IT boys". Crain’s New York Business. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  8. ↑ Robert Hackett (June 23, 2014). "Need to lock your mobile device? Just doodle". Fortune. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  9. ↑ Jenna Lyons (July 22, 2014). "NSA targets college students to fill cyber professionals shortage". USA Today. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  10. ↑ Yuri Gubanov (May 23, 2012). "Interview with Nasir Memon". Belkasoft. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  11. 1 2 "Founders". Digital Assembly. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  12. ↑ "A new way to detect digital child pornography?". ABC News. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  13. ↑ Somini Sengupta (December 23, 2011). "Logging in with a touch or a phrase (Anything but a password)". The New York Times. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  14. 1 2 Andy Greenberg (November 10, 2011). "Gesture-based login apps for iPad And iPhone aim to banish passwords from touchscreens". Forbes. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  15. 1 2 Lisa Myers; Aram Roston (June 27, 2005). "Bogus analysis led to terror alert in December 2003". NBC. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  16. ↑ "Faculty:Nasir Memon". NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. Retrieved November 9, 2015.
  17. ↑ Pearlman, W; Said, A (2011). "Methods for lossless compression of images". Digital signal compression: Principles and practice. p. 368.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  18. 1 2 3 "Award and publications". NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. Retrieved November 11, 2015.
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