Roger D. Jones (born 1953) is an American physicist and entrepreneur. He currently is a Research Fellow at the European Centre for Living Technology at the University of Venice, Italy.

Scientific Interests

Jones, trained in physics at

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

, worked as a staff physicist at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

from 1979 to 1995. His primary research interests were in

plasma physics Plasma ()πλάσμα
, Henry George Liddell, R ...

laser fusion Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a fusion energy process that initiates nuclear fusion reactions by compressing and heating targets filled with thermonuclear fuel. In modern machines, the targets are small spherical pellets about the size of ...

, and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. Jones's current interests are in molecular computation in biological systems and

serious gaming Serious Gaming is a professional gaming team based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was founded in 2004 by entrepreneur Bas Peeperkorn. Serious Gaming is known for their achievements in first-person shooter Deathmatch (gaming), Deathmatch tourname ...

. He is currently involved in a European-Union project to personalize treatment for diabetic kidney disease.

Startups

Jones, along with other Santa Fe scientists and entrepreneurs such as

Doyne Farmer J. Doyne Farmer (born 22 June 1952) is an American complex systems scientist and entrepreneur with interests in chaos theory, complexity and econophysics. He is Baillie Gifford Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, where he is also Direct ...

Norman Packard Norman Harry Packard (born 1954 in Billings, Montana) is a chaos theory physicist and one of the founders of the Prediction Company and ProtoLife. He is an alumnus of Reed College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Packard is known for ...

Stuart Kauffman Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylv ...

, John Casti, and David Weininger, founded several high-technology

startup companies A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

in the emerging Santa Fe technology community, dubbed by

Wired Magazine ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online magazine, online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquar ...

as the "Info Mesa". Much of the effort of these startups focused on finance and the catastrophic

reinsurance Reinsurance is insurance that an insurance company purchases from another insurance company to insulate itself (at least in part) from the risk of a major claims event. With reinsurance, the company passes on ("cedes") some part of its own insu ...

industry. A later successful startup, Qforma, focused on healthcare analytics.

Center for Adaptive Systems Applications

The Center for Adaptive Systems Applications (CASA) was a company founded in 1995 by Jones, together with physicists Robert Stellingwerf, Camilo Gomez, and Stephen Coggeshall and business developer John Davies from

in collaboration with

Citibank Citibank, N. A. (N. A. stands for " National Association") is the primary U.S. banking subsidiary of financial services multinational Citigroup. Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, and later became First National City ...

. The company applied

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

and adaptive technology to

consumer banking Retail banking, also known as consumer banking or personal banking, is the provision of services by a bank to the general public, rather than to companies, corporations or other banks, which are often described as wholesale banking. Banking servi ...

. The company was one of several companies that spun off from Los Alamos and the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, includ ...

that focused on banking, finance, and retail applications. CASA applied

, adaptive computation, and other data mining techniques to the prediction of

customer behavior Consumer behavior is the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the activities associated with the Purchasing, purchase, Utility, use and disposal of goods and services. Consumer behaviour consists of how the consumer's emotio ...

. The first applications were in consumer banking, specifically the prediction of

personal bankruptcy Personal bankruptcy law allows, in certain jurisdictions, an individual to be declared bankrupt. Virtually every country with a modern legal system features some form of debt relief for individuals. Personal bankruptcy is distinguished from corporat ...

and credit card delinquency for

. The product offerings and projects expanded into smart agriculture, retail products, and management consulting. The company was acquired by HNC Software in March 2000 at the peak of the

dotcom boom The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

. HNC Software was subsequently acquired by

Fair Isaac FICO (legal name: Fair Isaac Corporation), originally Fair, Isaac and Company, is a data analytics company based in Bozeman, Montana, focused on credit scoring services. It was founded by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac in 1956. Its FICO score, a me ...

Corporation. Much of the technology developed at CASA became part of the

credit scoring A credit score is a numerical expression based on a level analysis of a person's credit files, to represent the creditworthiness of an individual. A credit score is primarily based on a credit report, information typically sourced from credit bu ...

offerings of

Qforma

Qforma was founded in 2000 by Jones, pharmaceutical executive Kelly Myers, John Casti, and Robert MacDonald. The company, initially called CommodiCast, worked in the financial services sector. By 2006, the company switched to healthcare analytics. The flagship product was a

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

that inferred the relationships among physicians in North America. The company merged with Skila Mederi in 2013.

Platform Economy

More recently, Jones has started companies in the transportation,

real-estate Real estate is property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this (also) an item of real property, (more general ...

, and book-publishing industries using the Platform-Economy model.Charles Colby and Kelly Bell, "The On-Demand Economy Is Growing, and Not Just for the Young and Wealthy," Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/insight-center/the-platform-economy Platform companies are those that have little or no inventory, such as bookstores without books, taxi companies without cars, or hotels without rooms. Examples of platform companies are

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), package ...

, and

Airbnb Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 b ...

References