Story by Katie Short. Photos submitted by Jeremy Harris.
When Jeremy Harris was a kid, he loved logic games and reading every variation of the “choose your own adventure” books.
In college, his relish for puzzles led Harris to physics and engineering. He took his first computer programming class, and — just as importantly — he watched the thriller “Enemy of the State,” in which Will Smith plays an everyman hero who becomes the target of sophisticated electronic surveillance and hacking.
The movie sparked a fascination with data and cybersecurity that Harris followed across the globe — and all the way to WVU.
The white hat
It was curiosity that led Harris into an Army recruiter’s office during his second year as an undergraduate.
“I walked in and asked them if they had any positions where they would basically teach you how to hack, but for good,” he said.
They did. Harris spent four years as a signals intelligence analyst for the Army, including time he spent recovering and processing intelligence from damaged aircraft in Afghanistan, Korea and Singapore.
A few years down the road, and Harris was working as an information technology director in Washington, D.C., crafting cybersecurity solutions for government contractors.
Then, he launched his own company and started solving IT and cybersecurity problems for small businesses.
“I just like solving logic problems. To me, it’s fun,” Harris said.
But by 2012, he was missing a sense of purpose. He and his family had moved to Morgantown, his wife’s hometown. His company had grown. Everything felt too easy.
He decided he was going to use computers and math to tackle complex business problems in ways others weren’t even talking about.
Turning on a dime
Harris began trying to imagine a technology consulting firm that would use computers to solve businesses’ problems. This was long before AI was a buzzword, and he struggled to formulate the pitch.
“My goal was, ‘What repetitive tasks are you doing in office that we could automate? What’s your biggest challenge?’ Those were the problems I wanted to solve,” he said.
But business owners couldn’t understand how Harris was going to provide them with solutions, and he found himself an entrepreneur himself ahead of his time.
What his prospective clients did understand was that their computers and printers needed fixing, and Harris had an IT background.
So he pivoted. His technology consulting firm became IT Mindshare, a cybersecurity and IT services company. For seven years, he fixed computers and set up networks. He went all in, and in 2018, IT Mindshare was named the SBA West Virginia 2018 Veteran-Owned Small Business of the Year.
Yet, “I’d forgotten why I started the company,” Harris recalled. “I was ingrained in the daily operations of growing, hiring people and getting new clients.”
In 2019, Harris went to a conference in Chicago, planning to do some networking.
There, his plans changed.
The aha moment
“I went to three talks in Chicago,” he said. “There were speakers from NVIDIA, the Boston Red Sox, and, of all places, the Lincoln Park Zoo.”
Harris heard about how the zoo was reducing wait times for visitors by opening more lanes at certain times of day, thanks to analysis of camera footage.
He learned how NVIDIA was solving computer vision problems with their graphics cards.
And he listened to the keynote speaker from the Boston Red Sox talk about using data analytics to build a World Series-winning team. Just like in the movie “Moneyball,” the Red Sox were scanning decades of player records, looking for patterns in player performance, game strategies, even fan engagement.
Harris couldn’t get enough.
“I really wanted to be challenged,” Harris said. “Everything I was hearing reminded me of some of my clients and their struggles. I thought, ‘We’ve got to get back to what I wanted to do initially.’”
Doing the math
Harris returned to Morgantown and started researching the WVU master of science program in Business Data Analytics, or BUDA.
He’d heard about BUDA from his neighbor, Brad Price, an associate professor in the WVU John Chambers College of Business and Economics. It had sounded “cool and interesting,” Harris said — but at the time, he wasn’t sure what it had to do with him.
After Chicago, he gave Price a call.
“This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” Harris told him.
BUDA gave Harris two important things: confidence and math.
“In BUDA, you’re learning statistics as you use statistics,” he said.
“One of my professors, Jim Harner, who has since passed away, taught what I would call applied statistics. We didn’t just learn the rules from Jim. He also taught us to ask how to use them.”
Before BUDA, Harris was able to solve many of his clients’ problems with his gift for educated guessing.
After BUDA, he said, he didn’t have to guess anymore.
“I didn’t have to tell a client, ‘I think this is probably a good solution.’ I could give them the statistics and concrete information behind it,” Harris said. “I could give them substance and hard math instead of opinion and my gut.”
Turning the page
Harris hadn’t even finished the BUDA program when he knew he’d gotten what he needed to nail his next challenge.
He signed on with the National Energy Technology Laboratory as a senior data scientist, working on projects spanning a vast array of AI and machine learning applications.
For NETL, Harris uses supercomputers to tackle energy-related challenges. Like the NVIDIA and Lincoln Park Zoo speakers who inspired him, he concentrates on machine vision, enabling algorithms to “see” and interpret images for analysis and segmentation.
He’s finally getting to feed his brain with new problems every day.
“This field allows me to take a problem that I’m not sure how I’m going to solve or even if it’s solvable, and I get to keep trying until I come up with a solution,” he said.
“It’s fun to understand what’s going on when I hear people asking, ‘Why is social media so addicting?’ or ‘How can my doorbell camera know the difference between a person and a package?’” Harris said, “I really enjoy knowing precisely how it works.”
The toughest conundrum he’s ever dealt with, he said, is figuring out which one he wants to tackle.
“Your challenge needs to be interesting to you,” he said. “If anyone asks me for advice on finding their adventure, I tell them to start with a hobby, a social issue or any passion that interests them. Then ask yourself, ‘What’s the problem I can solve here?’”
