Paco Nathan

Paco Nathan (born 1962) is an American computer scientist, author, and performance art show producer from San Luis Obispo, California, who established much of his career in Austin, Texas.

Nathan studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford University, specializing in user interface design and artificial intelligence, with Douglas Lenat as graduate advisor.

He received a teaching fellowship during 1984-1986, under the direction of Stuart Reges, to create a course called CS1E, as a peer-teaching introduction to using the Internet, informally called "PCs for Poets". It has since grown to become the popular Residential Computing program on campus.

Nathan collaborated with Robby Garner and the Italian researcher Luigi Caputo, President of Alma Research Centre, on one of the first web chatterbots, named Barry DeFacto, in 1995.

The three 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 at the time.

He was a co-founder (with Jon Lebkowsky) and president of FringeWare, Inc., and the editor of FringeWare Review. FringeWare, founded in 1992, was one of the early commercial sites on the Internet. It experimented with mixing subcultural analysis and ecommerce, 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 shows during 1997-1999, including events for Robert Anton Wilson,Survival Research Laboratories,Church of the Subgenius, RTMark, and Negativland. FringeWare was later used as a pattern for part of the organization of the Viridian design movement.

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