David S. Touretzky

Last updated
David S. Touretzky
David S. Touretzky.jpg
David S. Touretzky in 2007
Born
United States
Nationality American
Alma mater Rutgers University, B.A., 1978
Carnegie Mellon University, Ph.D., 1984
Known for Criticism of Scientology, free speech activism
AwardsDistinguished Scientist, Association for Computing Machinery, 2006
Scientific career
Fields Artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience
Institutions Carnegie Mellon University

David S. Touretzky is a research professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a BA in Computer Science at Rutgers University in 1978, and earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. (1984) in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Touretzky has worked as an Internet activist in favor of freedom of speech, especially what he perceives as abuse of the legal system by government and private authorities. He is a notable critic of Scientology.

Contents

Research

Touretzky's research interests lie in the fields of artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and learning. This includes machine learning and animal learning, and in particular neural representation of space in rodents (e.g., in the hippocampus) and in robots. [1] In 2006, he was recognized as a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery. [2]

Criticism of Scientology

Since the 1990s, Touretzky has worked to expose the actions of the Church of Scientology. He sees the actions of the organization as a threat to free speech, and he has taken a prominent part in Internet-based activism to oppose it, also appearing regularly as a critic in radio and print. He has also worked to expose what he sees as dangerous and potentially life-threatening treatments provided by Narconon, the Scientology-based drug rehabilitation program. He maintains a Web site named Stop Narconon, [3] which archives media articles critical of the program. Dr. Touretzky's research into Narconon was a primary source of information for a series of San Francisco Chronicle newspaper articles criticizing Narconon on June 9 and June 10, 2004 that ultimately led to the organization's program being rejected by the California school system in early 2005. [4]

Touretzky has undertaken extensive research into the secret upper levels of Scientology, and he has made this information available to the public on the OT III Scholarship Page (concerning Xenu) and the NOTs Scholars Page [1] [5] (concerning the higher Operating Thetan levels). These pages, he states, are academic studies of Scientology's texts, and the proprietary materials are therefore legally available due to careful application of the academic fair use provisions of copyright law. [6] The Church has failed in their attempts to have them removed, after repeatedly threatening Touretzky with lawsuits [7] [1] and filing complaints against him with Carnegie Mellon University. [8] Carnegie Mellon, in turn, has issued statements in support of Professor Touretzky, noting that his criticism of Scientology is a personal affair and not the opinion of the University itself.

Touretzky has been the object of public attacks by the Church of Scientology, including various "dead agent" campaigns against him. He has been accused of religious bigotry, racism, misogyny, misuse of government funds, support for terrorism, and collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, among other misdeeds. [9]

Free speech activism

David Touretzky is an Internet free speech activist. He has supported several movements in what he perceives as abuse of the legal system by government and private authorities.

In 2000, Touretzky testified as an expert witness for the defense in Universal City Studios et al. v. Reimerdes et al., a suit brought by seven motion picture studios against the publishers of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly (the case name refers to Shawn Reimerdes, an unrelated defendant who settled prior to trial.) The suit concerned the publication of DVD decryption software known as DeCSS, which the plaintiffs asserted was illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Dr. Touretzky testified as an expert in computer science on the expressive nature of computer code, and convinced the court that code was indeed speech. Touretzky also created an online gallery of various renditions of the DeCSS software. Readers sent in their own renditions of the decryption algorithm, including a mathematical description, a haiku, and a square dance.

In reaction to the federal prosecution and eventual imprisonment of 18-year-old political activist Sherman Austin for hosting bomb-making instructions entitled Reclaim Guide on his web site, Dr. Touretzky provided a mirror on his Carnegie Mellon website for more than two years, although he acknowledged on the website that his own reposting of the information did not violate the plain language of the statute under which Austin was convicted. [10] In May 2004, to avoid harassment of the university and controversy in the media, Dr. Touretzky moved the mirror from the Carnegie Mellon server to a private site. [11] [12]

In 2011, Touretzky began hosting a mirror of the website of George Hotz, containing executable files and instructions facilitating the jailbreaking of the Sony PlayStation 3, after Sony filed lawsuits against Hotz and other hackers aiming to utilize the takedown provisions of the DMCA to remove the content from the Internet.

Publications

Books
Articles
Other

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DeCSS</span> Free open-source program to decode DVDs with encryption

DeCSS is one of the first free computer programs capable of decrypting content on a commercially produced DVD video disc. Before the release of DeCSS free and open source operating systems could not play encrypted video DVDs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie Mellon University</span> Private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The institution was originally established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became the current-day Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raj Reddy</span> Indian-American computer scientist (born 1937)

Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-born American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He was the founding chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.

Michael John Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. Witbrock is a native of New Zealand and is the former Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence.

Sherman Martin Austin is an American anarchist and musician who was arrested for inflammatory content on his website and subsequently convicted. He was the first person to be successfully prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. 842(p), a United States federal law which makes the distribution of information on explosives unlawful if the information is provided with the knowledge or intent that the information will be used to commit a violent federal crime. Austin was convicted under a plea agreement in 2002 and served a one-year sentence in federal prison. Some academics and activists, including Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, protested the prosecution of Austin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Fahlman</span> American computer scientist (born 1948)

Scott Elliott Fahlman is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated planning and scheduling in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks, on the programming languages Dylan, and Common Lisp, and he was one of the founders of Lucid Inc. During the period when it was standardized, he was recognized as "the leader of Common Lisp." From 2006 to 2015, Fahlman was engaged in developing a knowledge base named Scone, based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network. He also is credited with coining the use of the emoticon.

The Andrew Project was a distributed computing environment developed at Carnegie Mellon University beginning in 1982. It was an ambitious project for its time and resulted in an unprecedentedly vast and accessible university computing infrastructure. The project was named after Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, the founders of the institutions that eventually became Carnegie Mellon University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ACT-R</span>

ACT-R is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson and Christian Lebiere at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind. In theory, each task that humans can perform should consist of a series of these discrete operations.

<i>Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley</i> American legal case

Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429, was a court ruling at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The ruling was the first significant test of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human–Computer Interaction Institute</span>

The Human–Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is a department within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is considered one of the leading centers of human–computer interaction research, and was named one of the top ten most innovative schools in information technology by Computer World in 2008. For the past three decades, the institute has been the predominant publishing force at leading HCI venues, most notably ACM CHI, where it regularly contributes more than 10% of the papers. Research at the institute aims to understand and create technology that harmonizes with and improves human capabilities by integrating aspects of computer science, design, social science, and learning science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Omohundro</span> American computer scientist

Stephen Malvern Omohundro is an American computer scientist whose areas of research include Hamiltonian physics, dynamical systems, programming languages, machine learning, machine vision, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. His current work uses rational economics to develop safe and beneficial intelligent technologies for better collaborative modeling, understanding, innovation, and decision making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Illegal number</span> Number representing illegal information

An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Randy Pausch</span> American professor of computer science, human-computer interface and design (1960-2008)

Randolph Frederick Pausch was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan W. Black</span> Scottish computer scientist

Alan W Black is a Scottish computer scientist, known for his research on speech synthesis. He is a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karin Pouw</span> Scientology official

Karin Pouw is a French-born American official within the Church of Scientology International. Since 1993, she has held the position of Director of Public Affairs in the Office of Special Affairs (OSA) and serves as one of Scientology's international spokespersons.

<i>Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. v. Hotz</i> Lawsuit between Sony Entertainment and hackers geohot and fail0verflow

SCEA v. Hotz was a lawsuit in the United States by Sony Computer Entertainment of America against George Hotz and associates of the group fail0verflow. It was in regards to jailbreaking and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3.

DeCSS haiku is a 465-stanza haiku poem written in 2001 by American hacker Seth Schoen as part of the protest action regarding the prosecution of Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen for co-creating the DeCSS software. The poem, written in the spirit of civil disobedience against the DVD Copy Control Association, argues that "code is speech."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Xing</span>

Eric Poe Xing is an American computer scientist whose research spans machine learning, computational biology, and statistical methodology. Xing is founding President of the world’s first artificial intelligence university, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hideto Tomabechi</span> Japanese cognitive scientist and computer scientist

Hideto Tomabechi is a Japanese cognitive scientist computer scientist.

Lawrence Pileggi is the Coraluppi Head and Tanoto Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a specialist in the automation of integrated circuits, and developing software tools for the optimization of power grids. Pileggi's research has been cited thousands of times in engineering papers.

References

  1. 1 2 3 McCullagh, Declan (20 March 2001). "A Thorn in Hollywood's Side". WIRED. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  2. ↑ Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, or Member - 2006
  3. ↑ "Stop-Narconon.org: Protecting the Vulnerable from Narconon/Scientology". stop-narconon.org. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  4. ↑ Nanette Asimov, "Schools urged to drop antidrug program, Scientology-linked teachings inaccurate, superintendent says", San Francisco Chronicle , February 23, 2005.
  5. ↑ "NOTs Scholars Home Page (Scientology)". www.cs.cmu.edu. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  6. ↑ "Analysis and response to Roger M. Milgrim, noted intellectual property attorney at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker". 16 September 1996. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  7. ↑ "RTC's Lawyers React to the "NOTs Scholars Home Page"". www.cs.cmu.edu. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  8. ↑ Mark C Rathbun (7 March 2014). "Scientology Infiltrates Carnegie Mellon University". Moving On Up a Little Higher. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  9. ↑ "David S. Touretzky discusses Scientology, Anonymous and Tom Cruise". Wikinews. 6 February 2008. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  10. ↑ David S. Touretzky, "What the FBI does not want you to see at RaisetheFist.com", online document, version of July 12, 2005.
  11. ↑ CMU Professor's Web Site Causing Controversy Archived 2005-02-16 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ↑ Break The Bank-DC S30 2001 Archived 2005-04-16 at the Wayback Machine . (Touretzky's mirror of the bomb-making instructions hosted by Sherman Austin.)

Further reading

In the media
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.