Interview
Jeff Jonas, IBM Fellow: Talks at GS Session Highlights
- Jeff Jonas plans to develop entity-agnostic systems capable of processing thousands of data sources simultaneously, with the specific G2 project aiming to integrate geospatial awareness and multilingual support for English, Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Spanish.
- The G2 initiative intends to reduce false positives in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) systems while adhering to "Privacy by Design" principles, embedding a complete list of privacy protections before development begins.
- New systems will utilize a "data tethering" method to ensure that adding, changing, or deleting a record automatically updates the entire ecosystem, guaranteeing that every record possesses a verifiable pedigree and enabling the tracking of full history after any merge.
- To address the challenge of balancing government data transparency with privacy needs, the approach posits that maintaining full attribution is essential to prevent harm to innocent individuals incorrectly placed on watchlists, with a requirement to redesign any system causing consumer surprise or headlines.
- In astronomy, the strategy employs 3D space-time boxes and space-time zip codes to anticipate asteroid positions, allowing external FORTRAN code to calculate locations at specific times and reducing the number of asteroids in a single zip code to approximately 2,000 per day.
- This method aims to solve the n-squared collision problem in under 2,800 computer hours, a significant reduction from the previous 10 million hours, and will process new asteroid discovery data in 15 minutes instead of prior timeframes.
- The projected outcome for the next 25 years indicates that humanity will "probably no" be safe from asteroids, necessitating a strategy that widens observation space by adding new data rather than solely refining mathematical error reduction.
- The overall outlook assumes that while solutions will generally be "absolutely simple," heavy lifting will be required in specific areas, with expectations that simulation results will convince astronomers of the collision math approach's efficacy despite their current preference for theoretical mathematics.