Paco Nathan - Thinking in "graphs", a data and tech pioneer on living in a complex world

I have trouble wrapping any adequate labels around this episode’s guest, Paco Nathan. Paco is a technologist, data scientist and an evangelist of a brighter data and technology future. He has an uncommon ability to synthesize the gaps and trends in this complex and evolving space, and gives me hope that we can create a more flourishing future within it.

Paco has over 40 years experience in the tech industry, including everything from the inimitable Bell Laboratories in the late 80s to NASA to a number of wildly successful early stage tech startups, a pioneer in that industry before it was the giant it is today. Such is Paco's singular gift - to somehow see trends before anyone else. I attribute that skill to his way of thinking about the world - in graphs, which allow him to hold and navigate the complexity of it - we get into how he does that.

Nathan was one of the first experimenters with Amazon Web Services, the Cloud Computing behemoth today. He is undeniably an originator of open source software and, now, of open science. Through his roles with the open source Hadoop project and involved with several tech conferences, such as the Knowledge Graph Conference (KGC) and JupyterCon, Paco orchestrates into a new community data scientists, business analysts, researchers, educators, and developers.

Paco was among the first students of a new multi-disciplinary degree in the 1980s at Stanford which is now called Mathematical and Computational Science, picking up his Bachelors and Masters in 1986. In 2018 he launched Derwen AI, a group looking differently at problems in data and artificial intelligence (AI): themes, issues, governance, risk, people, projects, near-term scenarios.

Paco Nathan brings systems science, data science, art, and AI to his work, an uncommon combination that might just be the set of literacies our entire society needs.

It was an honor to have Paco Nathan lend his insight to Origins. Please enjoy!