Fernando Flores

Carlos Fernando Flores Labra (born January 9, 1943) is a Chilean engineer, philosopher and entrepreneur. As a 28-year-old engineer serving as technical director of the state development agency CORFO under President Salvador Allende, he initiated and directed Project Cybersyn from 1971, a real-time computer network intended to help manage Chile's nationalized economy, after contacting the English cybernetician Stafford Beer for guidance on applying cybernetic theory to the project. Later, at Stanford University, his conversations with Terry Winograd led to their 1986 book Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, which applied speech act theory to the design of computer systems and workflow management and was named Best Information Science Book of 1987 by the American Society for Information Science. He went on to found several software and business process companies and served as a senator of Chile for the Tarapacá and Arica and Parinacota regions from 2001 to 2009.