Gobble. Gobble. Thanksgiving is just around the corner and what a better pun to shoe horn into the topic discussion but carving...data!

Digital storage devices can hold data. Lots. One of the more common file types are images and as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But there is more than just the image itself and many investigations will require you to recover the picture and all associated information about the pictures to correlate with other system artifacts.

There are exciting new techniques and technology that can allow you to carve the picture data from allocated and un-allocated space to recover the image. But what you get back is more than just the carved meat but all the fixin's about the picture that can make a case.

This month our speaker is Professor Nasir Memon who will be giving a presentation on this topic.

Photo Forensics: There is More to a Picture Than Meets the Eye

When presented with a device full of active or deleted data – what do you know about the images? Can you recover them all? Can you tell which camera they are taken with? Can you tell if they are manipulated? Can you find from the Internet all other pictures taken from the same camera? Forensics professionals all over the world are increasingly encountering such questions.

Given the ease by which digital images can be created, altered, and manipulated with no obvious traces, digital image forensics has emerged as a research field with important implications for ensuring digital image credibility. This presentation provides an overview of recent developments in the field, focusing on three problems.

First, collecting image evidence and reconstructing them from fragments, with or without missing pieces. This involves sophisticated file carving technology.

Second, attributing the image to a source, be it a camera, a scanner, or a graphically generated picture. The process entails associating the image with a class of sources with common characteristics (device model) or matching the image to an individual source device, for example a specific camera.

Third, attesting to the integrity of image data. This involves image forgery detection to determine whether an image has undergone modification or processing after being initially captured.

So please join us on Wednesday, November 17th, 7:00pm at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 899 Tenth Avenue (59th St. and 10th Ave.) in Room 610T for this exciting meet-up.

Biography: Nasir Memon is a Professor in the computer science department at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, New York. He is the director of the Information Systems and Internet Security (ISIS) lab at Polytechnic http://isis.poly.edu...

Prof. Memon got his BE in Chemical Engineering and MS in Math from BITS, Pilani, India, 1981. He got his MS in Computer Science (1989) and PhD in Computer Science (1992) from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Prof. Memon's research interests include Digital Forensics, Data Compression, Computer and Network Security and Multimedia Computing and Security. He has published more than 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings and holds 4 patents in image compression and security with six more pending application. He has won several awards including the NSF CAREER award and the Jacobs Excellence in Education award. He has been a PI or Co-PI on research and education grants exceeding 12 million dollars. He has appeared on NBC nightly news as an expert on steganography and his research has been featured in NY Times, MIT Review, Wired.Com, New Science Magazine etc.

He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Security and Forensics. He was 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.

Prof. Memon is the co-founder of Digital Assembly (http://www.digital-as...) and Vivic Networks, two early stage start-ups in Polytechnic's BEST incubator.