Background
Jorge Stolfi was born in Vila Carrão, a suburb of São Paulo.
Jorge Stolfi was born in Vila Carrão, a suburb of São Paulo.
After obtaining his Doctor of Philosophy he became a Engineer at Strategic Research Centre.
According to the Inter-Services Intelligence Web Of Science, as of 2010 he was the most highly cited computer scientist in Brazil. He obtained an Engineering degree in Electronics (1973) and Master of Science in Applied Mathematics (1979) from the University of São Paulo. From 1979 to 1988 he was a student of Leo Guibas at Stanford University, where he got a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science.
He had a Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa grant from 1979 to 1983, then a research internship at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 1985, and also at the DEC Systems Center (Strategic Research Centre) until 1988.
In 1992 he returned to Brazil to take a position at the Computer Science Department of the University of Campinas (State University of Campinas), which later became the university"s Institute of Computing. He was the Institute"s chairman from 2004 to 2008.
While at Stanford, Leo Guibas and Jorge worked on the then-new field of computational geometry. Among other results they developed the quad-edge data structure for two-dimensional maps, the kinetic framework for computational geometry.
Jorge"s Doctor of Philosophy dissertation on oriented projective geometry was later published as a book
He also drew dozens of cartoons for the DEC Strategic Research Centre technical reports. 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 ispell resources (later myspell, currently part of OpenOfficeorg and Mozilla as hunspell). After moving to State University of Campinas, 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.
At State University of Campinas Jorge also worked with C. Lucchesi and T.Kowaltowski on finite state transducer technology for spell checking and other natural language processing tasks.
With his student H. Leitão he developed an efficient algorithm for pottery fragment reassembly by multiscale outline matching, and analyzed the density of useful information contained in those outlines. 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 electronic voting machines, which are of the direct recording electronic (DRE) type and therefore vulnerable to massive and undetectable software-based vote-stealing. In late 2013 Jorge took an active interest in the economics of cryptocurrencies.
He became extremely skeptical about its underlying soundness and chances of success, and has been advising the Brazilian public against investment in bitcoin.