Dr. Atif Memon Promoted to Full Professor

The University of Maryland's College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences announced May 14, 2015 that Dr. Atif Memon had been promoted from Associate to Full Professor.

Dr. Memon joined the University of Maryland in August 2001 as an Assistant Professor. With research interests spanning software engineering, human-computer interaction, cybersecurity, bioinformatics, and computational biology, he is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Department of Computer Science here at the University. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Karachi, a master's degree from the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, and a doctoral degree from the University of Pittsburgh.

"My last few years have been dedicated to building algorithms, tools, and techniques aimed at 'democratizing' software testing," notes Dr. Memon. "I have been working to empower the end user and system administrator to quickly and fully automatically test the latest release of a software application before installing it for use. […] By crowdsourcing testing in this way, we will be able to find those bugs that matter to us most."

Department Chair Samir Khuller writes that "Professor Memon is a leader in the area of software testing and extremely well known for his work in GUI testing." In addition to founding and leading the Event Driven Software Lab (EDSL) at the University, Dr. Memon has created GUITAR, a test automation framework for graphical user interface (GUI) applications. He currently advises six doctoral students, and—along with Dr. Neil Spring—mentors undergraduate students as an Honors Chair in the Computer Science undergraduate program.

What next for Dr. Memon? "In the next few years, I intend to work on democratizing security assessment for mobile devices. No longer will we need to trust app providers to take care of our security. As end users, we will be able to assess our own security and make informed decisions about app updates, and malicious and colluding apps.

"Being a full Professor in CS at Maryland is a life-long dream come true," writes Dr. Memon. "I am truly blessed to be surrounded by amazing faculty, staff, and students who have been extremely supportive throughout my career at Maryland."