Identity Analytics at IBM

I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation and meeting Jeff Jonas at IBM. A dynamic and engaging speaker Jeff started a software company whose early deployments were doing identity analytics to catch bad guys in Vegas casinos. Not to over simplify but identity analytics is looking for the relationships between pieces of identity data to build identity profiles. He later sold the company to IBM and continues there with the typical large company-like title of “IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist, Entity Analytic Solutions, IBM Software Group”

A deep thinker he doesn’t strike me as your typical technologist. Head over to his blog to see what he’s up to. What I find interesting and worth noting is that he is doing research on what he calls "anonymous entity resolution" or :

“…technique enabling advanced data correlation while only using irreversible
cryptographic hashes.”

Or maybe this helps understand it:

“This new capability makes it possible for organizations to discover records of
common interest (e.g., identities) without the transfer of any privacy invading
content”

Think about the barriers that technology has the potential to break down and the applications that it enables. That could really be a game changer.