How Prepared Are You For The Data Economy ?

Colin Parris ’85, Electrical Engineering, Howard University, is one of the greatest data economy evangelists on the planet.

- Lango Deen

One of his proudest accomplishments is his role in the Blue Gene Supercomputer business.

But long before supercomputer projects for high performance system-on-a-chip architecture, Parris was an emerging leader in the world of digital convergence.

“When I first began at Howard, I was focused on electrical engineering, and then this thing called software suddenly showed up,” he recalled.

“People were always building processors and chips and electronic circuits to solve a problem, but software enables you reconfigure the electronic circuit very quickly so you can have the circuit do other things on top of a processor,” he explained.

Parris fell in love with software at Howard. His electrical engineering degree course not only introduced him to BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction) and Pascal, it gave him a ready network—students and professors—and taught him how to learn, which comes in handy considering the rate and pace at which Internet of Things (IoT) technologies he is involved in develop.

He also learned the difference between simply writing code and architecting code.

“If you’re just going to write code, yeah that’s interesting, but can you write effective code? Can you write code that’s secure? Can you write code that’s flexible?”