Du Castel was born in 1952 in France a descendant of
Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, who governed France as Prime Minister before being defeated by
Napoléon III, and
Paul Dubois, whose
Joan of Arc sculpture stands in Washington D.C. A graduate of
Ecole Polytechnique with a 1977 PhD from the
University of Paris in
Theoretical Computer Science, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the
IBM France Research Center before hiring with
Schlumberger in France in 1978. He emigrated to the United States in 1983 where he has lived in
Austin, Texas since, becoming an American citizen in 1994. In 2000, du Castel was invited by the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence to make a
presentation of
artificial intelligence advances in the industry that were original to academia. Consequently, du Castel was invited to present at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2001), du Castel joined with Timothy M. Jurgensen, author of two books on
computer security, to write
Computer Theology: Intelligent Design of the World Wide Web, which uses theological principles to study the role of religion in computer networks, and reciprocally studies religion in the light of well-established computer concepts such as
trust. The book eventually proposed in 2008 a reference for the field of Computer Theology, following the road traced earlier by
Donald Knuth and Anne Foerst, aiming at a better understanding of computer
evolution as well as religion. ==Positions==