Jorge Stolfi

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Jorge Stolfi

Jorge Stolfi (born 1950 in

image processing, splines and other function approximation methods, graph theory, computational geometry and several other fields.[1][2] According to the ISI Web Of Science, as of 2010 he was the most highly cited computer scientist in Brazil.[3]
Outside of academia, Stolfi has accrued an online following due to his skepticism and comments on Bitcoin.

Early life and career

Jorge Stolfi was born in

Xerox PARC until 1985, and also at the DEC Systems Research Center
(SRC) until 1988. After obtaining his Ph.D. he became a research engineer at SRC.

In 1992 he returned to Brazil to take a position at the Computer Science Department of the

University of Campinas (UNICAMP), which later became the university's Institute of Computing
. He was the institute's chairman from 2004 to 2008.

Research

While at Stanford, Leo Guibas and Jorge worked on the then-new field of

cartoons for the DEC SRC technical reports.[7]

In 1992 Jorge collected and widely disseminated (through the historic DEC gatekeeper ftp archives and Prime Time Freeware) a set of wordlists that later formed the basis of the

myspell, currently part of OpenOffice.org and Mozilla as hunspell
).

After moving to UNICAMP, Jorge developed affine arithmetic, a model for self-validated computation (which he had conceived in 1991), in collaboration with Marcus Andrade, João Comba, and Luiz Figueiredo.[8][9]

At UNICAMP Jorge also worked with C. Lucchesi and T.Kowaltowski on

finite state transducer technology for spell checking and other natural language processing tasks.[10] With his student H. Leitão he developed an efficient algorithm for pottery fragment reassembly by multiscale outline matching,[11] and analyzed the density of useful information contained in those outlines.[12] He has also contributed to the study of the Voynich manuscript
.

Since 2001 Jorge has been involved in efforts to raise public and government awareness about the insecurity of Brazilian

direct recording electronic (DRE) type and therefore vulnerable to massive and undetectable software-based vote-stealing.[13]

Bitcoin skepticism

Starting late 2013, Jorge took an active interest in the economics of cryptocurrencies. He became skeptical about its underlying soundness and chances of success and has been advising the Brazilian public against investment in bitcoin.[14] In 2016 he submitted a letter to the SEC outlining what he perceives as similarities between Bitcoin and penny stocks or Ponzi schemes.[15] In response, another person by the name of Colin Baird wrote the SEC to cast doubt on Stolfi's letters, without addressing any of Stolfi's arguments.[16]

In 2021, Stolfi wrote a paper titled "Bitcoin is a Ponzi", in which he summarized the main characteristics of a Ponzi scheme, and its similarities with Bitcoin.[17] The paper went viral after it was posted on HackerNews, a website frequented by computer programmers, where it received over 500 upvotes.[18]

In 2022, after posting to Twitter that "blockchain technology is a fraud", he inspired 1500 experts to write a letter to US Congress about the risks of cryptocurrencies.[19]

References

  1. Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development
    . 2010.
  2. ^ "Jorge Stolfi". DBLP. University of Trier.
  3. ^ "ISI Highly Cited Researchers in Brazil". Thomson Institute of Scientific Information. Retrieved 2010-12-28.
  4. S2CID 52852815
    .
  5. ISBN 0-8186-0508-1
    .
  6. Stanford Ph.D. dissertation, Primitives for Computational Geometry, available as DEC SRC Research Report 36 Archived 2021-10-17 at the Wayback Machine
    , published by HP Labs. Accessed 2010-12-28.
  7. ^ Mason, James (1993). "The First 99 Reports". DEC SRC Report 100. HP Labs. Retrieved 2010-12-28.
  8. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.37.6453
    .
  9. S2CID 2431872
    .
  10. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.36.9713
    .
  11. ^ "Bitcoin is a Ponzi | Hacker News". news.ycombinator.com. Retrieved 2021-11-02.
  12. doi:10.1109/tpami.2002.1033215
    .
  13. ^ Vicentin, Carolina (2010-07-05). "Voto digital contra a fraude". Correio Braziliense (in Portuguese). Retrieved 2010-12-28.
  14. ^ (2013) Cuidado com Bitcoin!. Blogpost (in Portuguese) at AdVivo.com, Accessed on 2014-04-12.
  15. ^ (2016) [1] Letter to the SEC dated 2016-07-13
  16. ^ (2016) [2] Rebuttal letter to the SEC dated 2016-11-28
  17. ^ "Bitcoin is a Ponzi". ic.unicamp.br. Retrieved 2021-11-02.
  18. ^ "Bitcoin is a Ponzi | Hacker News". news.ycombinator.com. Retrieved 2021-11-02.
  19. ^ "Jorge Stolfi: 'Technologically, bitcoin and blockchain technology is garbage'". elpais.com. Retrieved 2022-07-17.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jorge_Stolfi&oldid=1181947518"