Roger Jones (physicist and entrepreneur)

:"For Roger Jones the mathematician see Roger Jones (mathematician)"

Roger D. Jones, PhD (b. 1953) is an American physicist and entrepreneur.

Roger D. Jones is currently Chairman, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Scientific Officer of Qforma, Inc. located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Trained in physics at Dartmouth College, Jones worked as a staff physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1979 to 1995. His primary research interests were in laser fusion and machine learning. [ [http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00285658.pdf Roger D. Jones, "Machines that Learn," Los Alamos Science (Special 50th Anniversary Edition), 21 1993, pp. 196-203.] ] [ [http://internet.cybermesa.com/~roger_jones/tech2.htm Technical publication list] ] [ [http://internet.cybermesa.com/~roger_jones/tech.htm Recent technical publications] ] In the early nineties he headed projects that applied his machine learning inventions to technical problems in the private sector. At that time he became embroiled in controversy over corporate welfare and the role of technology transfer from the national laboratories to the private sector. [ [http://www.corporations.org/welfare/inquirer.html Gilbert M. Gaul and Susan Q. Stranahan, "How Billions in Taxes Failed to Create Jobs," Philadelphia Inquirer, (Sunday, June 4, 1995) p. A01.] ] In 1995 in collaboration with Citibank, Jones co-founded the Center for Adaptive Systems Applications (CASA), a company that applied neural network and adaptive technology to consumer banking. [ [http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/1633 "Domenici dedicates new office for Los Alamos spinoff," Los Alamos National Laboratory Press Release, August 7, 1997.] ] [ Thomas Petzinger, "Sometimes It Takes a Nuclear Scientist to Decode a Market," Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1999, p. B1. ] CASA was acquired by HNC Software in March 2000, at the peak of the dotcom boom. [ [http://www.kdnuggets.com/news/2000/n04/i3.html kdnuggets story] ] HNC Software was subsequently acquired by Fair Isaac Corporation. [ [http://www.fairisaac.com/Fairisaac/News/Press+Releases/Archives/Fair+Isaac+Completes+Merger+With+HNC+Software.htm Fair Isaac press release] ] Much of the technology developed at CASA became part of the credit scoring offerings of Fair Isaac. Jones along with other Santa Fe scientists and entrepreneurs such as Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard, Stuart Kauffman, and David Weininger founded several other high-technology startup companies in the emerging Santa Fe technology community, dubbed by Wired Magazine as the "Info Mesa." [ [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.06/infomesa.html Ed Regis, "Greetings from the Info Mesa," Wired Magazine, (June 2000) p. 337.] ] [ cite book | author=Regis, Edward | title=The Info Mesa: Science, Business, and New Age Alchemy on the Santa Fe Plateau | location= New York | publisher=Norton| year=2003 | id=ISBN 0-393-02123--8] [ [http://www.commodicast.com/pdfs/TechComm%20Stirrings%20on%20the%20InfoMesa%20Dec%202003.pdf Catherine Anderson, "Stirrings on the InfoMesa," TechComm, (December 2003 and January 2004) pp. 19-21.] ] [M. Mitchel Waldrop, "Chaos, Inc.," Red Herring, (January 2003) pp. 38-40. ] Jones introduced the first entirely virtual company. [ cite book | author=Rogers, Everett M. | title=Diffusion of Innovations, Fifth Edition| location= New York | publisher=Free Press| year=2003 | id=ISBN 0-7432-2209-1 p. 405-407 ] Much of the effort of these startups focused on finance and the catastrophic reinsurance industry. [ [http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-02/features/featsurprise/ Dana MacKinzie, "The Science of Surprise," Discover Magazine, Vol. 23, No. 2, 59-63 (February 2002).] ] [ [http://internet.cybermesa.com/~roger_jones/020726%202002Feb%20Computer%20World.pdf Kathleen Melymuka, "What if...?," Computer World News Story, February 4, 2002.] ] By 2004 the companies Jones co-founded merged into a single company, Qforma, Inc., that focused on adaptive and predictive technologies for the pharmaceutical and financial industries.

Roger Jones has an Erdos number of 4. [ [http://www.oakland.edu/enp/rota.html Eulogy for Paul Erdos by Gian-Carlo Rota in which Rota identifies his Erdos number as 2.] ] [ [http://www.ms.uky.edu/~jrge/Rota/rota.html A list of Gian-Carlo Rota's PhD students in which Mike Hawrylycz is identified. Rota supervised Hawrylycz's thesis. This gives Hawrylycz an Erdos number of 3.] ] [ [http://internet.cybermesa.com/~roger_jones/Risk%20and%20Survival%20of%20Economic%20Agents.pdf M. Hawrylycz, R. D. Jones, V. Makhankov, and D. Prichard, "The Risk and Survival of Economic Agents," Random and Computational Dynamics, 1997, Vol. 5, Number 4, pp. 214-242. Paper coauthored by Jones and Hawrylycz. This gives Jones an Erdos number of 4.] ]

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