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Here are excerpts from Tom H. C. Anderson interview with Jeff Jonas, a IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist IBM Entity Analytics
(also a triathlete and host of great parties in Vegas).
Tom: You're IBM Distinguished Engineer Chief Scientist, IBM Analytics. Can you tell us what is Entity Analytics is and what it is you do?
Jeff: Entity Analytics is the remnants of my Systems Research and Development (SRD) company. I founded SRD in the early 80's and IBM acquired it in January of 2005. My work focuses on people, organizations, things, places - call these "entities" - things that can be uniquely counted. The analytics part refers to making sense of entity data. Detecting that the employee a retailer hired had previously been arrested for stealing from the same retailer would be an example of entity analytics. My work involves doing this in real time, so organizations can avoid making such blunders in the first place.
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Tom: What do you think about various privacy measures such as "Do-Not-Track" etc. currently being discussed in government?
Jeff: I would prefer to see opt in models that opt out models. In any case, I also think location privacy is going to become a very important debate. Geospatial movement data is something I refer to as "Analytic Super Food."
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Tom: You've talked about big data and how analysis actually becomes faster the more data you have. For those of us who have crashed various analytics programs with larger data sets this is hard to understand. Can you explain a bit how this can be possible? And is this more theory than actual testing you have done?
Jeff: Sounds wild at first, but actually it is something quite simple. Why are the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle as easy as the first few? You have more data (puzzle pieces) in front of you than ever before. I have some more details about this here: Puzzling: How Observations Are Accumulated Into Context
Read more.