Vice President, Software and Analytics Research, GE Research
Dr. Parris is currently the Vice President, Software and Analytics Research at the GE Research in Niskayuna, NY. He took this role in 2014 and has two major responsibilities. He is responsible for all of the industrial analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and software systems research for the General Electric Company. He also created and leads the Digital Twin Initiative across the General Electric Company.
Digital Twin is a leadership engineering modeling and analytics capability that allows the modeling and control of individual industrial assets to drive continuous operations and business optimization (in 2016, created over 600K digital Twins that delivered over $300M of profit and revenue). Dr. Parris is an Officer of the General Electric Company and a member of the Corporate Executive Council (CEC).
Dr. Parris previously worked at IBM from 1994 to 2014. He was an IBM executive for 16 years in roles that spanned research, software development, technology management, and P&L management. He was the Vice President, System Research at the IBM T J Watson Research Division, the Vice President Software Development of IBM largest system software development lab (6,000+ developers world wide), Vice President of Corporate Technology, and the Vice President and General Manager of the IBM Power Systems (i.e. responsible for IBM’s $5B+ P&L Unix System and Software business).
He had been a member of the IBM Integration and Values Team (top 300 executives worldwide) for 10 years until 2014 and was a member of the IBM Performance Team (top 60 executives worldwide) in his role as General Manager of IBM Power Systems.
In his last role he was the Vice President, Systems Research in the IBM TJ Watson Research Division responsible for creating market-making systems and system software that provided leadership for IBM’s next generation of mainframe, distributed, and storage systems.
Before this role Dr. Parris was the General Manager and the Vice President for IBM’s Power Systems business). In this role he was responsible for all of Power Systems’ business operations, including the P&L delivery, for the $5+ Billion dollar revenue businesses. This business encompasses all of the server, operating systems, and systems software sales and delivery associated with the UNIX, IBMi, and Linux marketplaces.
Prior to this role he was Vice President, Systems Software Development and Lab Services, responsible for over 6,000 software developers in16 countries, delivering all of IBM’s system and management software in STG.
Dr. Parris has previously held executive roles in several IBM organizations. He was Vice President of Industry Solutions in IBM Research where he was responsible for creating unique industry-strategic IBM smarter planet solutions. He was also Vice President, Strategic Growth Development, responsible for the commercialization of the Blue Gene Supercomputer, and Vice President, Technology for the IBM Corporation in which his responsibilities included overseeing all of IBM’s current and future technology directions.
Dr. Parris received a Doctorate of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.E.E.), a Masters in the Science of Management (M.S.M.) from Stanford University (as a Sloan Fellow), a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley (M.S.E.E.C.S.), and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Howard University (B.S.E.E.). He has also received various technical and community honors and awards, has published several technical papers and patents.