The other day I met Jeff Jonas for an hour long meeting at his PR agency’s office. Jonas is the chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group, he built the system that foiled the MIT Blackjack Team in Vegas and he’s since gone on to do all sorts of interesting things like thwart criminals for the CIA and participate in several marathons. Essentially, Jonas is a finely tuned machine, and that day I’d had 3 hours of sleep and I arrived with toothpaste on my face. Needless to say, I was a little intimidated.
Halfway through the meeting Jonas tells me the story he likes to tell at the podium during banquet dinners. While on the last leg of a triathlon in South Africa, he saw a runner with what he thought was diarrhea on his backside. He asked him if he was alright and the man reached down, touched the substance and licked it saying aloud, “It tastes like mango.” A juice packet had broken in the man’s back pocket without him noticing it. Said Jonas, “This is what I do. I build data analysis systems that make real time assumptions and then build them to correct themselves.” At that moment I eased up and corrected my own assumptions about Jonas.
