Robert Moniot

Dr. Robert Moniot is an Associate Professor at Fordham University with a joint appointment in the departments of Computer and Information Science and Physics. After receiving his PhD from U.C. Berkeley in 1979, he worked for three years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the nuclear physics laboratory in Rutgers University in New Jersey, helping to pioneer the technique of accelerator-based mass spectrometry (AMS). He joined Fordham in 1982. He has collaborated with AMS researchers in Italy and Australia, publishing numerous papers on studies of beryllium-10 and carbon-14 in meteorites and geological samples. He has also done work in developing new methods of solution of ill-conditioned problems. Dr. Moniot is the principal author and maintainer of ftnchek, an open-source program that performs a static analysis of programs written in Fortran. Dr. Moniot served as Associate Dean of Fordham College Lincoln Center from 2004 to 2009.

Dr. Moniot began his research career in physics, measuring isotopes of noble gases in meteorites and terrestrial and lunar rocks by conventional mass spectrometry. These isotopes record the effects of processes such as the bombardment by cosmic rays or the decay of long-lived radionuclides. Such measurements allow one to determine how long a meteorite has been in space or when a rock crystallized from a magma. After completing his PhD thesis on this subject, he began work on the then-new field of accelerator-based mass spectrometry, which allows the measurement of long-lived radioisotopes that are two rare to be detected by conventional methods of analysis and too long-lived to be measured efficiently by decay counting. This method has become the standard for carbon dating of archaeological artifacts, where it allows much smaller sample sizes than previously required. It is also applicable to measurement of beryllium-10, aluminum-26, and other isotopes with half-lives on the order of a million years.

Alongside the physics research, he has worked on the development of new computational techniques. Scale-space and equation-error minimization are methods that allow ill-conditioned problems to be solved that are difficult to deal with by direct solution methods. The new methods can be applied to problems in image reconstruction and solution of partial differential equations. Lately, he has begun to study problems of computer ethics, particularly questions that are often associated with software quality. His papers have considered the problematic trade-offs among usability, reliability and security in the design of popular operating systems.

R. Moniot (2010). "Software Piracy". The Handbook of Technology Management. Wiley, New York.

R. Moniot (2009). "Deming Least-squares fit to multiple hyperplanes", Applied Numerical Mathematics, 59:135-150

R. Moniot (2007). "The Taxman Game", Math Horizons, 14(2):18-20 NOTE: this paper received the Mathematical Association of America's Trevor Evans Award. [Evans-Award]

R. Moniot (2007). "The Future of Electronic Voting", Ninth ETHICOMP International Conference on the Social and Ethical Impacts of Information and Communication Technology, Tokyo, Japan, March 27-29, 2007.

R. Moniot (2005). "Software Piracy". The Handbook of Information Security. Wiley, New York.

R. Moniot (2004). "Securing Software for the Information Society", Seventh International Conference on the Social and Ethical Impact of Information and Communication Technologies, Syros, Greece, April 14-16, 2004.

R. Moniot (2004). "Software Piracy". In H. Bidgoli (.eds), The Internet Encyclopedia. Wiley, New York.

R. Moniot (2001). "Ethical Issues of the Desktop Metaphor", Fifth International Conference on the Social and Ethical Impacts of Information and Communication Technologies, Gdansk, Poland, June 18-20, 2001.