Nassib Nassar is an American computer scientist and classical pianist.
As a computer scientist, Nassar was among the architects of information retrieval software for the World Wide Web and was the creator of Isearch, one of the earliest open source search engines, in 1994. He was president of Etymon Systems, an open source software company founded in 1998 and best known for producing Etymon PJ, which became the standard library for generating Portable Document Format (PDF) documents in Java, and Amberfish, a large scale information retrieval system for semi-structured text and XML.
As a pianist Nassar was the winner of The American Prize in 2014 for his performance of the Brahms F minor piano sonata. Other performances have included the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven, played in a series of seven recitals.
References
- Menconi, David. "Nassib Nassar plays (and works) the keyboards." The News & Observer, January 10, 2015, Raleigh, NC.
- Zipper, Bernd. "PDF on the Fly: Tools and Strategies for Automatic Generation of PDF Files." The Seybold Report: Analyzing Publishing Technologies, August 19, 2002.
- Nassar, Nassib. "Automating PDF Objects for Interactive Publishing." Web Techniques, October, 1998.
- Fallen, Christopher T. and Newby, Gregory B. 2005. "Logistic Regression Merging of Amberfish and Lucene Multisearch Results." Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) 2005 Proceedings, Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Science and Technology.
- Sullivan, Dan. 2001. Document Warehousing and Text Mining: Techniques for Improving Business Operations, Marketing, and Sales. Wiley.
- Hu, Gongzhu and Tang, Chunxia. 2004. "Indexing XML Data for Path Expression Queries." In Software Engineering Research and Applications, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer.
- Arnold, Stephen. "Etymon: Maybe Another Lost Search Vendor," January 19, 2009.
- Barrios, Karla. "Meet a Tar Heel: Piano man/computer scientist Nassib Nassar." University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, November 6, 2014.
- The American Prize