Paco Nathan (born 1962) is an American computer scientist and early engineer of the World Wide Web. Nathan is also an author and performance art show producer who established much of his career in

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

Early life

Paco Nathan was brought up in San Luis Obispo, California. He studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford University, specializing in user interface design and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...

, with Douglas Lenat as graduate advisor. He received a teaching fellowship during 1984–1986, under the direction of

Stuart Reges Stuart may refer to: Names * Stuart (name), a given name and surname (and list of people with the name) Automobile *Stuart (automobile) Places Australia Generally *Stuart Highway, connecting South Australia and the Northern Territory Northe ...

, to create a course called ''CS1E'', as a peer-teaching introduction to using the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

, informally called "PCs for Poets". It has since grown to become the popular Residential Computing program on campus.

Career

Nathan collaborated with Robby Garner on one of the first web chatterbots, named ''Barry DeFacto'', in 1995.R. Garner, P. Nathan
"FRED, Milton and Barry: the evolution of intelligent agents for the Web"
Advances in intelligent systems, 1997.''portal.acm.org'' They have worked together on several related projects, including the JFRED open source project for developing Java-based chat bots. They used ''JFRED'' in BBC Television's "Tomorrow's World MegaLab Experiment" and attained a 17% Turing percentage during what was the largest online

Turing test The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluato ...

at the time. He was a co-founder (with Jon Lebkowsky) and president of FringeWare, Inc., and the editor of

FringeWare Review ''FringeWare Review'' was a magazine about subculture (predominantly cyberculture) published in Austin, Texas. Many of the publication's writers and editors were associated with other publications such as ''Boing Boing'', ''Mondo 2000'', ''Whole ...

. FringeWare, founded in 1992, was one of the early commercial sites on the Internet. It experimented with mixing subcultural analysis and

ecommerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manag ...

, hence the name "fringe" plus "ware". Through work at FringeWare in support of small press publishers and fringe subcultures, Nathan also helped produce a series of

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

shows during 1997–1999, including events for

Robert Anton Wilson Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilso ...

, Survival Research Laboratories,

Church of the Subgenius The Church of the SubGenius is a parody religion that satirizes better-known belief systems. It teaches a complex philosophy that focuses on J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, purportedly a salesman from the 1950s, who is revered as a prophet by the Church. Sub ...

, RTMark, and Negativland. FringeWare was later used as a pattern for part of the organization of the Viridian design movement. Nathan has written for several other publications including O'Reilly Net, '' Wired'', '' Whole Earth Review'', ''

Mondo 2000 ''Mondo 2000'' was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded ' ...

'', and was a contributing editor for '' Boing Boing'' during the early 1990s. His first article for ''

'' about the IBVA brainwave interface system was credited as inspiration for the song ''Hi-Tech Hippies'' by Yellow Magic Orchestra. YMO. "Hi-Tech Hippies", Technodon, track 5 (see liner notes), 1993. Other popular writings have included a parody (''nEurorAncid'') of the

cyberpunk Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian Futurism, futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of low-life, lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial in ...

novel Neuromancer, and court-room reporting on behalf of a newly launched '' Wired'' during the federal trial of Steve Jackson Games v. US Secret Service. More recent work has focused on applying aspects of systems theory for computer network applications. Nathan led an engineering team at Symbiot to develop software for monitoring and visualizing risk metrics of complex

network security Network security consists of the policies, processes and practices adopted to prevent, detect and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources. Network security involves th ...

systems. That work received an Apple Design Award in 2004, was cited as a source for the United Nations ''UNCTAD Information Economy Report'' in 2005, and spun off as an open source project called OpenSIMS. During his period at Symbiot, Nathan helped pioneer a controversial "hands on" college program in network security at Austin Community College, for which he received a NISOD Award for Teaching Excellence in 2003. Some of the technology at Symbiot emerged from an earlier project created by Nathan, called ''The Ceteri Institute'', which used complex systems modeling to analyze aspects of multinational corporations. That effort followed from several years of writing, speaking, and political organizing on behalf of anti-corporate activism. During the period of 1999–2002, he summarized that material in a series of papers and lectures about "corporate metabolism". (excerpted from Parallax View conference) Results of that work were forwarded by author Bruce Sterling as a post-9/11 analysis. , Nathan works as the technical director for HeadCase Humanufacturing, combining previous experience in chat bots and ecommerce.

Early life

Career

See also

Notes and references

External links