Nasir Memon

Nasir Memon is a computer scientist based in Brooklyn, New York. 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. 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. 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.

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. Memon developed an automated software program that can retrieve and reassemble fragmented digital photographs, even when the directions for locating them have been deleted. 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. Digital Assembly has competed and won the NSF Phase I and Phase II SBIRs as well as an NYSTAR TTIP grant.

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 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. The app is able to distinguish the user's pattern from forgers after the user signs the screen with their finger five times. 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. The final ISO standard, JPEG-LS, was significantly influenced by the concepts utilized in CALIC.

Other activities Memon created the Information Systems and Internet Security lab, a hackerspace for students to work both on cyber offense and defense. In 2002, he received the Jacobs Excellence in Education Award from Polytechnic University. In 2010, he became an IEEE Fellow and received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer award for 2011–2012. 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. He has won best paper awards from IEEE and the Digital Forensics Research Conference. Memon was recognized for his research with the NSF CAREER Award and the Emirates ID Best Research in Advanced ID Systems.