November 9th, 2006
IBM's Jeff Jonas: Reducing corporate amnesia
Jeff Jonas lives in Las Vegas and used to make his living helping casinos reduce fraud and three letter agencies find the bad guys with unique technology as founder and chief scientist of Systems Research & Development. His software can sift through information captured in multiple database and correlate data, such as identifying individuals listed under different names in separate databases. In January 2005 he sold his small company to IBM and is now he is responsible for shaping the company's overall technical strategy of next generation identity analytics and the use of the new capabilities in the overall IBM technology strategy.
Jonas also spends about 40 percent of his time on privacy and civil liberties issues. For example, he is developing techniques for enabling advanced data correlation without transferring any content that violates privacy.
Jonas presented some of his ideas at the Web 2.0 Summit, and I caught up with him after his talk for an interview. In the video he discusses enterprise awareness, corporate amnesia and how he believes the problem of correlating data from disparate databases can be solved. The solution, he said, is to figure out when two things are the same despite being described differently in real time on streaming data. "You want the data to find the data and the relevance to find the user," he said.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
