Bill Gates on Computer Science and Innovation

[Applause] [Music] thank you well it's great to be here this evening they told me I could come too early in the morning or the computer science students wouldn't be up to hear what I had to say I want to share some of the exciting things that are going to happen I in computer science and how those are going to change the world in a pretty profound way computer science has done a lot over these last 25 years but I'd say that the most exciting years are the years ahead and there's amazing opportunities for all of you in contributing to that it's great to be here in this particular location a University of Illinois is great history of contributing to engineering in the sciences and actually this is the university that Microsoft hires the most computer science graduates from of any University in the entire world I'm always a tiny bit embarrassed speaking in university groups because of course I myself am a dropout but I'm not not here to spread spread the word about becoming a dropout in fact quite quite the opposite let me talk a little bit about how computing got to where we are today the early days of computing were very big machines and although there were visionaries like Vannevar Bush who as long ago as 1945 wrote about the Memex machine most people thought of them as tools of large organizations and certainly when I was in high school the computer was a very daunting thing people talked about taking those punch cards to get in the mail and putting staples in them so he could defeat that evil machine that was always sending you bills that didn't seem to be correct and nobody thought of it as a a tool of empowerment and it really took a an amazing breakthrough in chip technology the idea of putting at first thousands and eventually millions and in the future billions of chips of transistors on a single chip to get this idea that computers could become a tool for the individual I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created there are tools of communication on their tools of creativity and they can be shaped by their user new applications are coming out all the time now there was a few key elements that allowed that to happen from a software point of view one of the problems in computing was that the machines from every different manufacturer were incompatible IBM made different machines than digital equipment which were different than NCR or wing or univac or all the the big computer companies of the 1960s and 1970s and one of the unique things that Microsoft myself and Paul Allen had in mind was that we wanted to have a software layer that would hide the hardware differences and allow people to invest in software applications knowing that they could be used across all those machines in fact the goal was to create this virtuous cycle that is the as more applications became available more people would buy these machines and as more people bought them the economies of scale would allow the prices to come down creating a thriving personal computer and software business that was our dream and that was the the thing that got me to leave University and and start the company and it's a dream that to some degree came true today 600 million people get up every day and have personal computers that they use in a very rich way there's been a lot of milestones in that that progression the very first machine the Altair was a kid computer that could only light up the lights that was about all and it was a miracle if you could even program it to do that much then there was a generation of computers like the Commodore 64 the Apple 2 the trs-80 and Microsoft wrote the software that was inside those machines was actually a programming language called basic that let you get in and play around a little bit with the graphics and Android applications a major step took place as we move to larger memory machines in the early 80s the so called IBM personal computer with ms-dos that machine by today's standards is unbelievably primitive you know slow very limited storage but it really created the path for this virtuous cycle to to take place it was in the early 1990s that we moved up to graphical machines this is an approach of course that was pioneered it at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and then Apple with both their Lisa and Macintosh got behind it we got behind it putting the Windows software on top of the PC hardware and it's hard to remember now but when that was done it was considered a crazy thing people thought in a graphics interface was slow it's hard to program - and of course today we take that completely for granted the late-1990s were another step change in how we think of these machines because that's when they all began to be connected together the standards of the internet the pioneering work done here on the browser as a way of visualizing the information across the entire internet those things created a phenomena that was quite unbelievable and a phenomena that created almost a gold rush atmosphere the number of startups as we look back on it was pretty wild the valuations of companies that have no business model it was pretty wild but in a sense that hyper investment and that attention all accelerated the installations of the the connections and getting people aware that there was something pretty phenomenal going on here and today I think we very much take it for granted you know certainly when I want to look up what's new in some area of science medicine I want to look up something about history I just take it for granted that I can go and you know type in a few simple search terms and immediately be connected up with the information that comes from the very best experts in the world and so we've come a long way in fact the original Microsoft vision of a personal computer in every home and on every desk we've gotten a trajectory that's going to get us there but the systems we have today are not not the ultimate device they're not as reliable as we need they're not as secure as we need they're not as easy to use as we need in fact we have a technology that we call Watson that lets us monitor if people are willing to send us the reports when you get air conditions on PCs maybe some of you have seen that dialog that comes up and says do you want to send this report in and that gives a very statistical view of what drivers what applications what's going on in terms of that user experience and so you know it's just one source of data that says to us that we have a long ways to go to achieve the vision of the personal computer that's as easy as as it should be at the same time people are far more ambitious about what they're doing these machines we have a whole new area called social computing the idea of being able to reach out connect with friends meet new people and ways that's taking place we have new forms of communication so-called blogging wiki's that are drawing people in to participate in new ways on the area of entertainment this idea that you can play games with your friends have massive multiplayer games not just type but also talk to them and in some cases see them those things are being bootstrap now and they will eventually we'll just take those for granted well one of the things that helps us drive forward is the that Hardware advance the chip advance as predicted by Moore's law that says that will have a doubling in power every two years and that's held held true for these last 25 years and it looks that like it will hold true for the next 10 to 15 years actually mapping that increase in transistors into computer performance turns out to be a very tough problem as we get more transistors and very high bandwidths we're still limited by the latency the the actual delay in these systems at every level of the hierarchy is very much a limiting factor and there's a lot of clever things they're going to have to go on there but certainly we will have a lot of transistors the graphics processing units the CPUs all of these things are becoming phenomenally effective we have 64-bit computing that'll give us an address space of the lastest quite a long time moving up from the 32-bit address space and when we think of storage the limitations of the past where you could literally type and fill up a hard disk you know that simply can't be done now in fact the the hard disks that you'll have by the end of this decade you'll be able to store thousands of movies tens of thousands of photos and everything you create in terms of typing your entire lifetime on that single storage device fact storage capacity is going up even faster then ship performance that those double every 14 months or so and they're literally coming to the software companies and saying what are we going to do with all this storage what kind of applications what things can you create that will take advantage of that screen technology is a another very key factor you know we eventually needs greens that have unbelievably high resolution there's no reason that things like magazines or newspapers should be delivered in paper form the cost the the inability to search to annotate the fact that it's not completely up to date all those things are much superior in digital form but our systems you know still require batteries and they're still fairly heavy the resolution is is still improving but we're within a few years of a crossover point where most consumption of media will move to that that pure digital form partly because of these low cost LCD screens you know 20 inch LCD which used to be a $2,000 thing is coming down will be down at four or five hundred dollar price point within three to four years and so we have to think about how we take all that display space and resolution and use it on behalf of the user in fact we'll have to be fairly adaptive because the display space you'll have at your desktop will be much greater than you'll have as you're moving around the tablet type machine that you carry simply won't have that same display surface although at some point we may get screens that literally go back to the papyrus where you can unroll them and then we can get back to having really big screens anywhere that we go I mentioned graphics processors those are achieving a level of performance that will let us provide high definition realism as part of serious software activity or just as part of communication communication or game playing you know the next generation of video games will be thought of as the high definition devices and creating realist scenes that are already pretty good on today's PlayStation 2 or Xbox there's more than an order of magnitude improvement that comes in that generation and is is therefore at a level of reality that will really draw people in and allow for game genres that really haven't made sense to this point all of these things we connected with very high performance wireless networks you're experimenting with this and the the Siebel Center I know but things like ultra wideband will provide hundreds of megabits of connection and so the idea that you have to connect a computer up to the display that will be very antiquated you will connect up to the display simply over that that wireless connection and various new approaches like WiMAX will let us deliver wireless data at a very low cost way without building a lot of infrastructure and that's fundamentally importing too important to get computing out into all countries where you can't afford to run fibre optics or DSL or cable modem type infrastructure into all the residences but these wireless technologies taking advantage of semiconductor advanced in the spectrum will give us essentially infinite spectrum to those homes at very very low cost and so that's a breakthrough that we're just taking for granted and designing in to the assumptions we have about the software there will be devices of all sizes you know the screen that's up on the wall in a meeting room or in the living room in the house that's your largest way of interacting you do that at a distance I mentioned the desktop I mentioned the tablet of course the pocket-sized devices are kidding far more powerful as well and the idea that your digital wall at GPS locater and games and personal information will be there together with your communications functionality we'll just take that absolutely for granted we've even moved to a device size somewhat smaller than that we've come out with the I shall watch that I have on here this is called the the spot watch and what stas as it receives a data signal over the FM network it's a data sideband approach and so as I you know just look at my watch not only do I see the time but I see my calendar that's kept up to date I see news I see weather stock prices I get you know instant messages from people that I've authorized to send me information right there on my wrist sports games you can see and while they're in progress you know who's on base what's going on and then get the report on anything that you're interested in and the chip that's in here which is an arm microprocessor has ten times the performance and ten times the memory of the original IBM personal computer and so we can literally download programs into this device over the FM channel we we take what are called CLR programs and send them to this thing and so we can always create new channels new ways of gathering information and it's ubiquitous and and secure and so so scaling onto all these devices and getting them to work together so your information shows up where you want and you don't have to manually sync these things or think about the information mismatches those are big challenges and those are software challenges in fact software is where the action is I admit to some bias in this but I think even objectively you know the hardware people are doing their job they are going to give us the the miracle opportunities but will it be usable will it be secure will it be fun and exciting and approachable that is is purely something that the software industry needs to deliver on let's look at different domains where software can help us be more effective first let's take people at work people at work overwhelmingly are what we call information workers designing new products dealing with customer service forecasting demand buying and selling those are the kinds of jobs that over well mning lien developed economies are the vast majority of people and competition exists in terms of how effectively you do those jobs do you design a new model properly do you anticipate the demand you understand the least-cost way of getting something done do you you know see where your quality problems are and the insights into those things can be provided through software the lack of visibility of what's going on and all the information about a business that people have today is really quite unbelievable and they don't have the expectation that they should be able to look at all those transactions and data-mine the transactions and navigate the latest information but software can change that visualization techniques modeling techniques even things that you might think of as mundane saying that hey when you have a meeting you know let's make that meeting 20% more efficient let's allow people who aren't physically present to participate in a very rich way when you have a phone call why can't you just connect your screen up to their screen so instead of talking about a budget or a plan or whatever the information is you can sit there and edit that together the very mechanism of capitalism finding buyers and sellers there was a lot of hype in the late 1990s about how that would change become friction-free but in fact the software infrastructure was not present the idea of having software anywhere on the planet being able to find other relevant software in exchange very complex information we didn't have the the protocols standards and tools to make that work so as we connected up things with the internet we connected them up with a presentation standard HTML but the idea of arbitrary software no matter what the application is but take buying and selling is a good example of it we don't have that today and with the challenges of security and things that's not an easy thing but it is being built these are called the web services standards and they're fundamental to letting information be exchanged in a rich way they fulfill a dream of computer science that has existed for a long time dreams about heterogenous information that the advances in XML are finally solving those very tough problems and so within the next year is that foundation gets into place a lot of those dreams of the late 1990s will become a reality the cost of a transaction the cost of finding who can sell you the the product that is absolutely the most suitable and check their reputation and check the state of that transaction all of those things will move to be digital and that hasn't happened yet but with the software advanced that will absolutely take place people waste a lot of time on various communications modality you know today's software doesn't know which calls or emails are important to you you know you we've all been in meetings where people's cell phones ring we've all gone to our email and and found lots of unusual unwanted email that wastes our time and I have been offered many university degrees in that spam email and I don't know if they're targeting me or other people are being offered those as well the most interesting was they said that I four dollars a month they would pay all my legal bills and now I know they weren't they didn't mean it to come to me probably another good story about that is that just this weekend my wife and I were sleeping in a little bit our seven-year-old but came in and and woke us up and said you got to come you got to come and we said no no no we're you know it's still 7:00 why don't you go back and do keep doing what you were doing and she said well I was using the computer and it's amazing and I said would keep using it and she said no no no we won we won money dad and I didn't want to say something flipped like hey you know we don't need more money so you know I got up and of course it was one of those you know come on type things and you know there's my seven-year-old think she's want some amazing contest I'm trying to explain to her about you know it's just somebody trying to get her to go to that website and all out so we have a lot of work to have the computer model our interests what is worth interrupting us for at various context we're in during the day you know what kind of email should we see no matter what's going on what should we only see be brought to our attention as we go home how do we organize our tasks you know think about all the different things you want to get done computers not very good at helping us organizing those things notifying us about deadlines and literally when you know take phone calls today if you call somebody and they're not available if you can prove who you are through some caller ID type mechanism if you're a person works without other person their software ought to negotiate with you looking at your schedule to find exactly the best time for you to meet or be in touch with each other and the idea of phone Keg or busy signals and those things should really become a thing of the past but we need a software model we need something that's adaptive that learns that has the right authentication built underneath and we have far too many communications things you know email phone and even phones we have our phone at home we have the the portable phone the fact that we have to remember phone numbers and update those things the instant messaging is world of its own and all of those things really have to come together and help people and make people far more productive in terms of things that people do at home we are at the beginning of a revolution in terms of people being in control control of when they want to watch a TV show that the digital video recorders now getting people addicted to this idea that you know it's they're up to them to decide when they want to do it people are getting addicted to the idea that in terms of their music they can organize their clinic collection have playlists that they can have a portable device that they take with them that lets them play that music you know we're even getting to the point now where we can take videos and put those on a portable device this is a little device called a portable media center you can see the basic size of it that shows what comes up on the screen you connect this to your PC over a wireless or a USB cable and you can take whatever TV shows you've recorded your movies your pictures and all of those things can be downloaded onto this hard disk that's a 40 gig hard disk which of course is becoming unbelievably inexpensive and then relative to a music player the only extra expense is just having this LCD screen where that too is becoming quite inexpensive and so this is a different way of thinking about consuming media you know putting the person in control having it wherever you want it having your lifetime collection easy for you to get at and work with and as people have all this different media we need to make it easy for them to navigate around in this information I've just got two little quick demos that are ideas coming out of Microsoft Research that give a sense of how we think visualization can be made a lot better than it is today the first screen I've got here is to help you look at a set of movies or movie collection and so at the center we have a particular movie Blade Runner and you can see that off on the side here it takes things that are related in some way like everything that's directed by Ridley Scott on shows I can go in and you know cycle through at any speed see those different things and I can pick one of those and say okay put that at the center and then go look up in the database get me the information and tell me you know who are the actors so here's how all the Anthony Hopkins movies there's all the Julianne Moore movies I can pivot there and so this idea of going back and forth between these different things say a fairly straightforward thing not sure what that is another example is dealing with lots of photos this is a case where it's going to be so easy to take photos you're going to have thousands and thousands and in fact one of the reaches of researchers at Microsoft Research goes around with a what she calls a little photo button and it's noticing transitions during the day and it's taking a few hundred photos and so she doesn't even have to think about actually clicking a camera she just gets at the end of the day all these interesting photos that she can decide if she wants to share with people or in terms of having memories about you know her activities or things she's doing with kids or friends or things like that it's there it at no effort at all well you're going to get a lot of these photos and what do you do with them well this is a research project called media frame to start to suggest that we can t have user interfaces that make this practical so we see we have a bunch of images here hundreds we can hover over different ones of these and some of these actually aren't photos they're actually movies you know it's our belief that you'll more and more not think of photos by themselves and movies by themselves but rather you'll think of still images motion video and all of the audio that you capture either at that time or that you can easily add later on you will think about these things as wanting to organize them together now sometimes what you want to do is put various keywords on these things you can see here we've done that a little bit so let's take one let's go in and look at the things that relate to Thanksgiving I still have a fair number of photos here so I can go in and use a software algorithm that shows me which are the ones that have faces in it and those get highlighted or which are the ones that are indoors you can see it's automatically able to tell which those are and highlight those and so we have recognition software that actually did the orientation it found and notified me of all the slides that were coming in on miss rotated it did that without my having to spend time scanning through those things and it can see these two photos and in fact if I take the photos with those faces and I tell it who somebody is if I make an association in my contact list then in the future it will be able to do that recognition and do that categorization in a very automatic automatic way you know we have the idea of finding similar images actually let me go back into that and try this the similarity if images are similar it's actually looking at at what's inside here and so if I can take this image and see okay what else is similar to that if I relax the constraint eventually everything's similar but at this rating it's just these particular images and so actually intelligent analysis is part of how we'll be able to deal with these things if we go back and see the whole set again we can also try out a different view where we're using 3d and here what it does it takes and organizes them by time of course the camera storing lots of metadata with these photos it has a clock in it it is able to know you know when that photo is taken and I can just switch and change that x-axis and break it down into different groups and as I select a group of photos I can use these tags add tags change tags on a whole set all at once and so this just is just an idea that we ought to be able to make it reasonable to play around with lots of different photos and media clips and make navigating through those things a very very simple activity well the wellspring that really drives software forward is research and research is done both at universities and in commercial organizations and in fact the United States is dramatically the leader in both aspects of this the best universities are overwhelmingly here in the United States during this work and there's a real symbiosis of the relationship between the companies trying to build these things into products whether they're startups are larger companies in the universities you know very much a virtuous cycle of sharing ideas helping research get funded creating jobs for people and it's worked in a really fantastic way Microsoft is a big believer in investing in R&D our Rd budget at 6.8 billion is substantially the largest of any technology company and it's kind of amazing to me when I grew up you know I thought IBM was the big company and actually in terms of employees they are the biggest they still there have 330,000 I shouldn't say still employees and because they've taken an approach that's more based on services and in doing different things than we do you know we're very focused on building software products but to do that it's got to be about Rd and Rd that looks well out into the future and takes on the very toughest problems there's some good examples of collaborations here at University of Illinois the guy Annette distributed OS is something that some of our devices and software components can come in there and now I'm sure we'll learn a lot from what's going on there the experimentation of the Siebel Center built on a lot of different kinds of software including some of the conference XP things we've done there and we're very excited to see what can come out of that some of these research problems are very tough problems a good example of that is what we call trustworthy computing in fact when I met with the faculty earlier I was very pleased to hear this is going to be a major focus of bringing together a lot of research that ideas about security and reliability into an institute that looks at it in a Broadway when the internet was first designed it was designed assuming that different parts of the network could be malfunctioning that they might be broken or literally that they might be bombed but there was not an assumption that there'd be malicious actors on the network and so there's no authentication of the from and to addresses you know SMTP mail there's no authentication of who that meals coming from many of these systems software systems are built around passwords that are truly a weak link in terms of being written down or used on less secure systems or are being very guessable and so what we've ended up with is a situation that's very fragile any software bug can result in what's called an execution of privilege and then hijacking a system to either flood the network with traffic or to send lots of email out that appears to come from that person are various kinds of attack methods that are taking place there's no doubt that for computer science to fulfill its role in helping business helping entertainment that we've got to make this network secure and reliable we have to be able to make privacy guarantees to people in terms of how information is dealt with on this network and there's a lot of invention taking place here this has been our biggest area of R&D investment for many years now is about three years ago that we really push this up to the the top of the list and really brought in a lot of additional expertise some of the issues are very simple to solve you know moving to smart cards instead of the password having software we kept up to date so that when there are problems they don't sit there so people can do exploits having firewalls so you partition the systems off and you don't just look at what type of remote call is being made but you also look at who's making it the transition to IPSec and ipv6 will help us with this there are new programming methodologies around interpretive systems like our compact language runtime the CLR that helps you define the privileges of the piece software so you're not just doing exactly what that user is privileged to do but rather saying what's appropriate for that software some of the newer techniques have biological and inspirations of monitoring systems and having a way of looking at them and seeing when their behavior becomes abnormal both at a system level ended a network level so that's a very exciting area another big area of investment is what you might broadly call natural interface people you know the keyboards okay the keyboards can hear around for a long time but it'd be far more natural if we could use ink and speech as a way of getting information into these systems these are tough problems they've been worked on for a long time ink is somewhat easier than speech partly because users have a very explicit model of what readable handwriting is and what it's not and so even as people start to use our tablet PC that's got the ink built-in they find themselves you know take an e versus a C being a little more careful after they've had recognition errors - you know loop loop the e and and not loop the C and so you get more and more accuracy and so these handwriting systems are really coming into the mainstream you know the cost of the digitizer is extremely low and in the way that software is adopting to it we'll take this for granted that every portable PC is a a tablet type PC within the next two to four years speech has been a little tougher it's one that we are investing in very very heavily but users have no explicit model of speech in fact when the speech system starts to make errors their tendency is to not only get irritated but talk louder and whatever the model is of their speech becomes less and less capable as they're getting slightly more irritated at the system and the fact that there's no predictability and the system makes errors that every other thing you've ever spoken to which are humans would never make those errors is kind of frustrating so we have to get the accuracy levels to be extremely high there are great advances here not just driven by the extra power we have but modeling you know going through for example all of the users email and understanding the corpus of words that are typical in their discourse we're using that both in mail and in in speech capability having deeper language models having better microphone type systems one thing that's fascinating is that the difference between human and computer in a noise free environment well if you take the best case a noise free context free environment where you're just doing random words for a human and a computer the computer is not that bad the difference is very modest where the human gets the wild advantage is that the human has context they have a sense of what the speaker might say next based on on what's going on and what they know about the subject and humans are dramatically better at doing noise elimination and that this is a case where the signal Turing people and the speech people are coming together now to get a sense of okay how does the human audio system do this like most things related to human capabilities our appreciation for how good the human system is just gets higher and higher as we try and create the equivalent on a digital basis the ultimate natural capability is the idea of artificial intelligence and there's less research on this today than when I left school 25 years ago but there is some very good research going on bayesian systems are a type of system that attempt to model non nonlinear activities and there's many similar approaches that are becoming ripe and and can be applied in interesting ways we're starting out with some very simple things you're the only AI product that actually sells today is this vacuum cleaner that goes around so that gives you a sense of that we're really at the low level they're down on the rug trying to find our way around with an AI machine built in there we'll be able to make that rich and richer in fact learn from users how they play gather that information centrally and reprogram the AI machines down on those different systems one fascinating trend is that all of the sciences are becoming very data-driven take a science like astronomy Jim Gray who's one of our researchers realized that if you want to propose a theory about astronomy you need to look into all the different databases that are out there and yet these databases were not connected in a way they could perform these very rich queries and try and see you know what's the density of a star system like this or are there any cases of something where these two things are are near to each other and so he led a project taking very advanced software technology web services and built together with a lot of collaborators what's called the National virtual observatory and so no longer is astronomy just sort of being there 3:00 in the morning with your eye to the lens when the you know supernova explodes but rather it's doing sophisticated data mining and looking and forming theorems about the information that's been recorded over all time in this very large virtual database that's been created there that same sort of thing as necessary across all the different sciences biology being probably one of the the most interesting and challenging and so the interplay between people have computer science backgrounds and data mining and modeling and networking and what they'll be able to bring to advancing biology in these next several decades will be quite phenomenal I think it's really biology and computer science that are changing the world in a dramatic way you know other fields you know they're great but they are not changing the world they're not empowering people they're not making the advances like these are and it's actually at the intersection of these two fields where perhaps some of the most interesting activities taking place you know certainly Nature has come up with a learning algorithm that we have no understanding of and as we through various techniques are approaching that kind of capability implementing that in software will be a profound contribution all this computer activity is is so neat as a tool one of the big problems we get is the so-called digital divide that is that you have a lot of people have access in richer countries but even they're not not everyone and and yet the tool you'd like it to be everywhere what's the solution to that where you can drive the cost down the hardware side software side that's happening very effectively you can make sure there's lots of philanthropy in donations around it some good activity there it's actually the communications cost the broadband connections that are the most expensive part of this but even there the advances in wireless consulted the projects I had the most fun with that Microsoft and my foundation did over the last six years is go out to 18,000 different libraries and put in a total of 50,000 computers that are just sitting there so that any anyone who can reach the library can get in get out on the internet get that information use the latest software and it's amazing to see how people come in and use that and you know there's a lot more to be done there in terms of the schools in terms of looking at that on a global basis but it's a very important goal particularly if you see this as almost like literacy like reading literacy and the same imperative for everyone to have access now the tools of technology are changing global competition and there's a lot of concern about this the the tools of technology are making it possible for not only manufacturing type jobs to be done anywhere on the globe but actual services type jobs not just programming not just call center but you know design architecture any type of work if you have these rich collaborative interfaces that the internet and the rich hopper on top of the make possible that will let people compete for that work anywhere around the world and so we're going to go from a world where the thing that would predict your opportunity best historically was were you lucky enough to be in one of very few countries to in the future the best predictor will be what's your level of education if you have a college education no matter what country you're in there will be substantial opportunity because of the way these things connect together now this is an interesting challenge for the United States the United States actually did its best work during the the 1970s and 1980s and that was actually a period of great humility of concern about international trends in fact the great concern of that era was that Japan had a better model Japan was ahead of us Japan was going to go down industry after industry and just wipe out the United States including computing I was going to move there and although that was completely overblown you know completely wrong it underestimated the vitality both the commercial and research side in this country allowed us to really step back and examine what our strengths were in driving forward and and that's why such an amazing work I think was done during that period here we're going to have that same type of questioning as we're seeing more global trade and all these different activities as we see particularly India and China stepping on to the world stage with their University output and their you know the the energy and the innovation in those countries a lot taking place that will challenge the u.s. to say are we really able to keep our edge are we really able to keep ahead and it's the investment in research and it's the the value of intellectual property it's a lot of things that the US is actually pretty good at that we just have to renew our commitment to well so in my view is that the next 10 to 15 years computer science really will be magical that the impact you know whether you think what it's going to do for medicine what it's going to do for education what it's going to do for worker productivity the tact is really hard to exaggerate and I'm not saying this is going to happen in the next year or two you know every year there'll be some neat things as speech and ink and all these things come along but it's really the accretion of those things where people are used to the tool when the tool is super secure that creates this shift in how things are done you know how will education be done how will that change well that's one of those great great open question the key element in doing this is having great people and a Microsoft succeeds by having great people universities succeed by having great people and making sure that the reinvestment in those people take place there's a little bit of concern that you know the the peak enrollments in computer science are off from the years past and looking at that particularly on an international basis you know it says okay what aren't we doing to show the opportunities that are here another challenge of course is the lack of diversity both women and minorities in computer science are not nearly at the levels that we'd like obviously we'd like those numbers to be 50% purely diverse and yet the numbers are much more at the ten fifteen percent level and a lot that needs to be done about that you know I'm sure that this is a very multifaceted thing in terms of you know showing the opportunity giving people opportunity to young age to see that's very interesting and pointing out that these jobs aren't all just hardcore coding type jobs there's plenty of those those are neat I like that but a lot of them are much more in terms of having skillsets where you need to know computer science but also understanding usability and social factors and marketing and business and bringing those things together those are a lot of the really great jobs that are there on the minority opportunity front and I'm very pleased too that I've been able to sponsor what's called the Millennium Scholarship Program and thank you here at this university there are 25 millennium scholars including some here tonight and you know it's a neat thing and I hope all of you will serve as role models and really encourage other people to do the things you're doing because I think that's a key part of the the path forward so the the top problems you know just takes great people we will have any type of simple user interface secure type system and the direction this is going to hit and there's a lot of unknowns that are going to make this in my view by far the the most interesting place to be involved and so excited that many of you will go through a computer science program and join a variety of companies perhaps Microsoft perhaps some of the startups and really make this a reality because this is this is the important stuff and and the great stuff is all ahead of us thank you [Applause] I'm David Daniel with a college of engineering and we're very pleased that mr. Gates has agreed to take some questions we have three microphones set up on the lower level and I'd like to ask students or any others who might wish to ask a question to please come forward be brief with your questions if you wouldn't mind and we very much look forward to a discussion shall we start over here what do you think about the importance of incorporating context awareness into applications the importance of site of incorporating context awareness and how do you set up an infrastructure to do that yeah the awareness of context is absolutely critical so for example if the machine in your office has a microphone that machine ought to be able to notice that you're talking with somebody else in your office that's got a camera it ought to be able to tell whether your gaze is directed at the computer screen or if you're off working on something else and taking all these contextual clues looking at your digital schedule and bringing those together requires a certain set of scheming ization standardizing these things and having the input come from a variety of systems but it's an absolutely critical thing in order for software to work on your behalf and make these communications choices in a way that you're not having to sit there and manually control it at all times all right to the middle microphone please mr. gates one of the reasons that Microsoft has received somewhat of a bad reputation with the technological community in recent years is because it has adopted a very hostile position towards open source and the open source movement Linux in particular would you mind um I apologize for asking a compound question do you think you could tell us what role you think open-source will play in the years to come and also maybe explain why Microsoft seems so unwilling to engage in a fair and honest discussion about the relative merits of open source software versus for sauce software I'm not aware of any unfair or dishonest discussion there's there are many issues that exist around open source the there's an ecosystem that on an all Microsoft is a big believer in which is that in the university environment free software gets created and that source is out there people use that source they improve that source and in many cases that source is that software is directly used in to the original tcp/ip stack the sendmail software the mosaic browser you know those were great contributions now I also believe in the other part of the ecosystem where people can take that work and do a start-up company where the university can receive licensing fees that allows it to reinvest in its department and do even more neat things and you know sometimes that will go to companies like Siebel systems or Microsoft and others and they'll take that work and provide a better product and people will only pay for that product versus the free stuff if they've done things that make it better if the support policies and the innovation are there in a very strong way and so you know we we think that's fantastic some of the software we provide we provide for free obviously some of it we charge money for and so I'm not sure where you're seeing the hostile attitude the the people who believe in this so-called GPL which is just one license that's used they don't believe in that ecosystem that is and if you go to the more religious people about this they believe there should be no commercial software in other words it's their view that in terms of doing security advances or user interface advances that the only approach should be you have some other job I don't you're a barber during the day and really good at that and then you know at night you do these other things we see we want to have both coexist and so for example the the GPL that blocks the incorporation of that in the commercial software we encourage people to think twice there may be cases you want to do that but in fact and when I talk to the faculty earlier today and they have a very I was surprised they actually that they think very carefully about that and they have an open-source model that's not the pure GPL it's more like FreeBSD has always been done on that basis that's a very good thing so we compete with free software all the time actually the worst kind of free software for us is that when people buy Windows or they buy Office they get to use it forever and so it's not like a lot of companies where if you sell somebody a coke they get thirsty if you sell them a car the car wears out the refrigerator is out in our keys once we've done a good job selling lots of Windows in office our only opportunity is to sell more innovation that is to make a new version of office that is so much better you know say Outlook 2003 that's so much better that you're willing to license it install it learn it all of those things that we need to make super super easy and so our whole framework has us competing with three types of software all the time and driving enough innovation that using our low price high volume model in a we can afford to hire more computer science scientists and do more Rd so our attitude is you know all these models should coexist they don't think our model should exist we wish they'd be more open-minded about that over here to this microphone please on mr. gates I'm not sure how involved you are in the marketing or branding at Microsoft but I kinda had a question on all lecturers are here the professors it's a lot of examples with Microsoft not doing good things but then at the end it all comes back to be being but Microsoft's the greatest company I I kind of want to know like what your opinion is on that if you're satisfied with that kind of reputation what you guys are doing to change that reputation well if you do a poll and say in this country who's the most admired just to open and a poll who's the most admired company Microsoft comes out on top in that by a longshot and probably our toughest audience to be frank or people like all of you here and it which is fine I remember when I went I was in the university in computer science I had this attitude about IBM that ah they didn't know anything I knew everything better than they did and you know you're going to get that that kind of thing it's wonderful now as we get to know people as they come you know work there for the summer you know see the kind of advances we're trying to do you know then they get to know us they know we are doing the most interesting software work in the world in we're very aware of how software needs to improve in it in a dramatic fashion you know if you take any area of endeavor and say where her prices come down and where as performance improved the most you'll take the personal computer arena and that was not true in computing until we brought this model of hardware compatibility in a broad software industry doing these neat things and so you know we'll strive to have a good reputation if you have any advice on things we ought to do differently feel free to to send me a note thank you before our next question I want to mention that one of the house rules is no flash photo so if you would please curtail those let's go to the microphone there is there anyone up there nope back over here then hi mr. gates I have a really quick question um do you mind giving me one of those toys that's up there no I'm just kidding but I was actually wondering how do you what do you feel like Microsoft's role will be in you know third world countries such as India as technology advances there well Microsoft is a very much global company and so we're operating in virtually every country even countries that are not all that economically advanced we want to go in at a very early stage and help the government look at how they can use information technology to increase efficiency reduce corruption how they can invest in an education system that has access to the Internet so that they are getting access to the same great information that people in the world's best universities have access to and so with each country we sit down and we create what's called a partners and learning program that says how do we get computers out to the schools how do we get the teachers trained around the software and we do over a five-year period we do several billion dollars of grants and both cash and software to help with these learning activities we also want to go into the community and say where can we set up community centers where people have access and finally and probably in some ways our biggest role is to make sure that our local partners have great opportunities you know companies like Infosys and Wipro in India we had people there working with them making sure they had state-of-the-art software I understood those things way before those companies became well-known and now those companies have thrived they're creating jobs they're paying taxes giving back to the economy there and there's many others that are coming in to do those things you know India we have a very special relationship with the Indian Institutes of Technology because they've been such a source of great education in that country and making sure that thrives and that they've got access to the latest technology is important to us so for each country we go in and do some being special there that fits that country you know for me in terms of my philanthropy you know that's very focused on developing countries and in India there's a particular challenge having to do with not being very focused on a potential AIDS epidemic there and so I've done a lot some 100 million that are focused on raising the awareness of that making sure the right things get done the middle microphone mr. gates with the technological advances that are happening in a lot of other countries in the world how do you think that outsourcing will impact the u.s. job market for software developers over the next decade well I think when we think about outsourcing there's nothing unique about software development I mean every job that's done at a desk whether it's answering the phone or you know preparing a tax return you know designing house all these jobs can now be done in a distant distance and we really do have to think about this as consumers as well the fact that all that human potential all that incredible energy and IQ is now being unleashed and there's job opportunities you know here on this planet in a sense you don't think nationalistic ly you think hey for the six billion people the fact that we're going to have better goods and services that we're all going to have a chance to buy and we're raising these living standards it's a very good thing it will be a big challenge to this country for example do we let very capable people who want to legally immigrated into this country do we you know let them come in and continue to have that as an advantage in terms of renewing the excellence that exist that's you know that's a political question that that will be decided that's been a huge benefit to the u.s. that we've been attractive as a place to be for people to come and we haven't made it too difficult to come even though recently it has actually been made somewhat more difficult the u.s. is going to have to raise its game in terms of the quality of the work being done and and some of some of the cost structure challenges that exist for Microsoft we're fundamentally going to be doing the vast majority of our development work here in the United States you know for us this is the place where we can hire the best people for us it's not just a matter of trying to save ten percent or you know 20 percent by doing it somewhere else we want to be in the market which is the most demanding market we want to get the highest quality work we can get done and and for us that'll mean having most most of our development here other than this microphone remember sir gates how much of an impact if any has Warren Buffett had on the way you conduct business Warren Buffett he gets no discredit for any mistakes I've made but he's been a phenomenal influence on me I think Warren Buffett in terms of thinking about how business should be done how you should employ people motivate people how you should think about tough problems I think he is is the most enlightened person and you know I my debt to him in terms of what I've learned is really quite incredible over to this microphone please um my name is Dan fight you can call me Dan I was curious if you could tell us a little bit about ambiguities computing and where Microsoft might be with that and what role it would hold in the future yeah you big good as computing to me stands for the idea that wherever you are you ought to be able to have access to your computing resources so you shouldn't just have to sit down at a single PC and use the keyboard to get at that machine there'll be a disaggregation of storage from computing from display and storage will be done both sort of in the network so that it's always backed up for you and it's infinite size storage there's a lot of good academic work on this and work coming out of Microsoft Research and you'll be able to have a portable storage device that you can carry around with you that has your music your files your authentication codes all carried around with with you one of the top problems in ubiquitous computing is privacy if all these devices are kind of finding each other and talking to each other you know how do you know that the user wanted them to the Bluetooth phones have this problem today there's immense you know security spoofing problems going on with that of how you authorize those connections so there's some innovation needed there many of these devices suffer that it's hard to do input until we have speech input and you know and visual recognition where you can scan the environment see who's there and see what gestures they're making that kind of thing it's very tough to do ubiquitous computing because as soon as you get away from the keyboard the number of bits of information that you can get back that the system is is very very limited but you know advances in vision and speech I feel very confident will solve those problems in some ways we have to think what problem are trying to solve a DBQ is computing you know one of the scenarios we go after is that business meeting and how we can make that more effective and here at the university some of the professors talked about how they're thinking about how ubiquitous computing applies in a learning environment and I think that's a great thing and I'll be fascinated to see what comes out of it to the middle hello I'm Ian at Meijer I was just wondering what is your ultimate goal in terms of of computer programming software why suppose the ultimate goal is that computers don't have to be programmed but that it's not clear that we'll get get to that in my lifetime perhaps some yours because it's it's it's been a very tough problem the big advance that's in front of us right now is being able to use modeling approaches very high level descriptions of what you're trying to get done so if you think think about businesses today the differences between businesses in terms of how they do order processing all that it's not that dramatic and yet they have to go in and change lots of lines of code and when they get new versions of the software they don't know how to merge that in they had there it's not very flexible in terms their their business approach you really shouldn't have to write lines of code for those things you should just see visual models that describe your order process and you should be able to without even knowing a deep programming language put in a description of how you want that that business model work and that's one of the things that you know we're working very hard on is that you just don't have to write as much code anytime you have to write a lot of code it's hard to write code code is always going to be expensive to verify and get right and so the real breakthrough approaches are ones where less code is needed over to this aisle first I want to say I'm a longtime listener first-time caller and my question for you is what piece of emerging technology do you think will have the most impact in the next 10 to 20 years and what you have income where you have what continues to drive you to develop such technologies well I I had a vision when I was young of a personal computer that was really quite phenomenal and way better than what we have today and that's a nice thing to have in a career to pick a goal that you don't achieve in a year or two you know if my goal had been to make a million dollars you know at some young age I would have been at loose ends as it is you know just in my own use of the computer I sit there and go oh geez we got to do better than this you know this is not what I I was dreaming up so it's very much a a cup half all I think one of the big advances is going to be the the various things around natural interface you know as we can get so you have a digital pin that records all the things that you write as we get so as you speak we can record and recognize those things as we get so we can do machine translation and this is one that we're very optimistic about being applied broadly even in the next four or five years the whole thing of people being able to exchange information will change in a very dramatic way so it's that naturalness I think is is really the next frontier of usage and value back over to this island yes sir I'm Duke gray I'm a senior in electrical and computer engineering a quick two-part question first of all is there any way you can float me a personal loan sorry I had to ask that one secondly history will no doubt be the judge that you're one of the more successful businessmen in American history however is there anything at all that in your life that you regret anything that you would like to have changed other than perhaps not graduating well I've been so lucky in terms of the people I've had a chance to work with and the problems I've had a Chan problems I've had a chance to work on that it it'd be hard for me to go back and say how that one bug you know I wish I hadn't had that one bug in my software you know Microsoft's constantly learning and so you know take all these security issues that are out there we are learning things today that we can say to ourselves jeez if we'd known this a year ago two years ago we could have done those things a lot better and you know so the sooner we get on top of those things the siRNA sooner we make the breakthroughs that better off we're going to be and we do have a wonderful feedback loop where the customers are very demanding you know people use software hours and hours at a time and they're very willing to send back information to tell us what to do so as opposed to my thinking geez I wish I'd done this better of the world had done this to treat me differently really I think on you know of all people more in the position where I have to think about you know sort of my responsibility to take the resources that I'm lucky enough to have and how those can go back to society in the way that's most impactful and that's something you know that's the work I'm doing through the foundation and something I'm I'm spending more and more time on middle hi my name is Yaya Chou and my question is what is the best way to solve a problem of bootleg products that is still remembered throughout the world solve the problem of pirated products or bootleg products well the easiest way to solve it is for people to want to pay for your for the products in terms of software piracy the place you see the least software piracy is in the business market that is particularly here in the United States there's no business of any size that that says to its employees hey steal the software I mean that the cost of the software you know to use office say cost you about eighty ninety bucks a year to use the latest and greatest software there and so if you think of that as a percentage of the salary or the desk or the phone or you know even paperclips it's to have the very best to have it be up to date it's a pretty good value proposition the place that you get the the most difficulty is when you have software that you're selling to extremely price sensitive customers and that that means the consumer market and they're on videogames technology's been used to make it so that you have to you have to have some authorization code to play the video game software that's the business model because the machine is actually sold at a loss and then there's a royalty stream that comes in through the software it's fascinating for us now in in markets like China to find exactly what the right model is and it turns out we're just experimenting with this right now but it looks like if we could make it so with your cell phone you just paid you know a few dollars a month and on an ongoing basis you decide yeah I want to keep using the very best software that that might be a more attractive model than paying one time upfront for the software and so we'll have to learn if that really pounds out but particularly in an environment where always fixing the software and giving you online support so we can help use that software we are thinking of software as more of an ongoing relationship than just a one-time thing and if that fits the buying model as well you know we met you may see us move to that on a on a global basis unfortunately that's all the time we're going to have to make available for questions but before mr. gates leaves I have a little something for him on behalf of all the students we'd like to present you with something to remind you of your visit to Illinois blue and orange or our colors we know you like to dress comfortably thank you our pleasure thank you thank you very much we stand adjourned thank you [Applause]

Channel: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Views: 54,943

Rating: 4.8684211 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft, Bill Gates, students, software development, software, career

Id: Zd-2nphKGfc

Length: 74min 7sec (4447 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 13 2012