In July 1997 he published The Agent Sourcebook (John Wiley, and Sons) on the business applications of intelligent software agents.
In August 2001 he returned again to the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory to lead the establishment of the IBM Institute for Advanced Learning. In January 2004 he joined IBM’s European services organization, where he was director of Strategic Innovation, leading a team known as Best of Blue.
He returned to the United States in June 2007 and lead the development of corporate business and technical strategy for Energy and Environment. This evolved during 2008-2009 into IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative.
In October 2004 he was inducted into the IBM Academy of Technology and in November 2004 he became a Master Inventor. He was named a Distinguished Engineer in 2010.
In former lives he spent several years at CERN in Switzerland building the CERN SPS particle accelerator (1976) and with EMI Central Research Laboratories, Hayes, England building the world's first clinically-useful magnetic resonance imaging system (1978)for the then Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith, England (now part of the Imperial College School of Medicine).
Colin has published a large number of papers and patents, and has received several awards. He loves attending classical music concerts, walking and skiing in the Alps. He is developing a second career as a nature photographer; see Studio Albis. He carefully nurtures a 1973 Triumph TR6 sports car. Colin is a Fellow of the IET, a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and was a founding member of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Colin and his wife, Lynn, have homes in Brookfield, Connecticut and Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. They have one son, Mark, and a Bichon Frisé, Montague.
Colin Harrison is a native of Scarborough in northern England and studied Electrical Engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology at the University of London and at Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 for studies of micromagnetic structures in thin single-crystals of nickel. He joined the IBM General Products Division in 1979 in San Jose to work on detector problems for magnetic bubble memories.
During 1981-87 he lead a research project for IBM Instruments, Inc. and IBM Federal Systems Division in medical imaging. He joined the IBM Research division in 1988 in the ACE multiprocessor workstation project and was one of the instigators of the development of portable computers with handwriting input and wireless communications. This lead in 1992 to the PC Vision video of future experiences of personal computing.
During 1992-93 he was on assignment at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he was a principal architect of the IBM Intelligent Communication Services platform.
During 1994-95, he managed the Communication Systems group. He launched a project to integrate telephone voice conferencing with Web-based conferencing and also an IBM-wide study of technology for providing real-time services such as voice telephony over packet networks, such as the Internet.
In March 1996, he moved back to the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, continuing his leadership of the Internet telephony work and his role as IBM Research strategist for telecommunications.
In March 1997, he returned to Hawthorne to become Department Group Manager and director of a partnership program between IBM Research and IBM Global Services.