“The data must find the data… and the relevance must find the user.”
The headline that depicts Jeff Jonas’ work in a nutshell. He is an entrepreneur, regular Ironman participant, but most of all he is an innovator. He has personally designed 100+ systems containing billions of transaction describing millions of entities.
In the early 80’s he ran his first software company to the ground, only to start a new one on the backseat of his car. The “Systems Research & Development” was some 20 years later acquired by IBM. His passion is catching “the bad guys” as he calls them. He worked for casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada where he also resides. For them he developed the infamous face recognition system that helps preventing criminal activity on the casino floor. He helped stopping the famous MIT group of students that skimmed the Strip of millions of dollars. It comes to no surprise that the CIA’s venture capital arm the so called In-Q-Tel acquired his expertise in counter terrorism efforts.
Since 2005 after IBM’s acquisition of his company he has worked in IBM where he achieved the most prestigious title IBM scientist can, he became “IBM fellow”. He continues with his work in assisting companies in data mining, so different pieces or as he calls them the “puzzles” of the information that are relevant can be put together, thus creating a bigger picture that is relevant to the company’s decision making.
He acknowledges the possibility of his inventions misusage but the surveillance is just irresistible as he put it. Although a big technology buff, he is in no way willing of putting his personal data on the world wide web easily. He does not use Facebook or any free e-mail providers.
On Wednesday October 3rd 2012, he took the stage at Faculty of Economics as the main speaker of IBM organized event titled “Jeff Jonas, power and sense of the analytics”. After introduction of the dean of FELU Dušan Mramor and CEO of IBM Slovenia Roman Koritnik Jeff Jonas provided a glimpse into “Steve Jobesque” way of making sometimes boring information technology interesting and inspiring. Attendees, that is experts and laymen alike, were more than satisfied with lecture that lasted shy of two hours. With his charisma he grabbed our attention and he did not let it go until the very end.
Kristian Jerebič, efnews
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