Joy A. Thomas

Timeline

1. 1979–1990

   IIT Madras and Stanford

   He grows up in Bengaluru, attends St Joseph’s Boys High School, and tops IIT-JEE in 1979 before studying at IIT Madras. He begins a Stanford PhD in 1984 with Tom Cover as his adviser and studies information theory. He receives the IEEE Charles LeGeyt Fortescue Fellowship for 1984–1985 and the IBM Graduate Fellowship for 1987–1990.

2. By 1991

   Research at IBM Watson

   By 1991, he works at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center. He spends more than nine years there, contributing to speech recognition, data mining, systems analysis and data compression.

3. 1991

   Elements of Information Theory

   With Thomas M. Cover, he coauthors Elements of Information Theory in 1991. The book covers entropy, data compression, channel capacity and rate distortion.

4. 1995–1999

   Adaptive dictionary compression

   With Peter Franaszek and John Robinson, he files an IBM patent application for adaptive multiple-dictionary compression in 1995. The patent is granted in 1999. Its method tests representative data samples and selects a compression mechanism for each block.

5. 2006

   Text mining at Stratify

   In 2006, he is Chief Scientist at Stratify, a Silicon Valley startup that organizes unstructured information. He leads development of text-mining, clustering and classification algorithms that form the basis of the Stratify Legal Discovery Service.

6. By 2011

   Chief Scientist at Iron Mountain Digital

   After Iron Mountain acquires Stratify, he becomes Chief Scientist of Iron Mountain Digital and leads advanced technology development before joining InsightsOne in 2011.

7. 2011–2016

   InsightsOne to Google

   He co-founds InsightsOne in 2011, and Apigee acquires it in 2014; he joins Apigee through the acquisition. Google acquires Apigee in 2016, and he joins Google as a data scientist working on API security.

8. 2020

   Data scientist at Google

   He dies on September 28, 2020, while working as a data scientist at Google.