Dr Lakshmanan Nataraj is a researcher with 15+ years of experience in AI, cybersecurity, computer vision, and signal processing. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his research included pioneering work on malware visualization, transforming binary code into images for malware analysis and detection.

His research spans cybersecurity, deepfake detection, media forensics, and satellite imagery, with 25+ papers, 8 US patents, and 5,000+ citations. He has contributed to U.S. government research programs funded by DARPA, ONR, and NGA as Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-PI, and was recognised as a Dagstuhl Scholar for his work on Media Forensics. He previously worked as a Principal R&D Engineer at Trimble Inc. on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision in Chennai and prior to that worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Mayachitra Inc. in Santa Barbara, California, USA. He currently advises government organisations, industry, nonprofits, and research institutions on AI, AI for Science, and AI safety, and serves as an AI Advisor to Ihe Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR).

Research Interests:

Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI for Science ane Engineering, Satellite and Aerial Image Analysis, Media Forensics and Deepfake Deteciton, Applied Cybersecutiry, to name a few.

Seminal Publications:

Malware images: visualization and automatic classification
L Nataraj, S Karthikeyan, G Jacob, BS Manjunath,
Visualization for Cyber Secutiry (VizSec) 2011

Detecting GAN generated fake images using co-occurrence matrices
L Nataraj, TM Mohammed, S Chandrasekaran, A Flenner, JH Bappy, AK, Roy-Chowdhury
Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics, 2019, pp 532-1 – 532-7,

Google Scholar Page: Lakshmanan Nataraj, Ph.D.‬ – Google Scholar‬

Teaching Modules:

DATA 434 / COMP 434: Visual AI: From Data to Interactive Experiences