Categories: General

We need all disciplines

The “revenge of the nerds” short economist post links to a report about the “return of investment” for college degrees There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that education is important and that it should be easily accessible to everyone. My concern about the economist’s tone in the post is that it promotes, perhaps unintentionally, science and engineering above other disciplines. Yes, I love science and I am a software engineer, so I am most likely one of the blue dots in the top right.

I am strong believer that for humanity to go forward we need all disciplines to be rewarded equally, we need arts as much as we need science, we need the humanities as much as we need computer science. We should be using such data to drive change instead of implying that science and engineering are a better option for the younger generation thanks to the promise of better financial rewards.

(image source: “Revenge of the nerds“)

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about