I think 19th century was about the
Industrial Revolution, about electricity, about disrupting their agricultural society and making it more advanced. The 20th century was about physics and
engineering, to do more things easier in our everyday life from refrigerators to
washing machines. And the 21st century is definitely the digital age. It's the Internet. Even if you want to become a race car driver or play baseball or a, you know, build a house -- all of these things have been turned upside down by software. The lettuce bot is a robot that can
sense its environment every single hour. This lettuce bot is seeing 1.5 million
plants and it's taking individual action on those plants. We enable lettuce growers to have higher yields in their fields. I hope we make it cheaper by
helping produce food in a more sustainable way, and that wasn't
previously possible without computer science and technology. I have a really fun job where we build Polyvore, which kind of combines all my favorite things so programming as well as fashion and art and design and shopping. Half the products you use these days are software products that you play with on your phone and so if you want to build something cool you need to know
programming, right? And there are so many things that you can do with computer
science so if you just work backwards from the cool thing that you want to
build and figure out what that is a lot of times computer programming is part of that, right? So you should learn this skill. It's really exciting right now. The
technology that we're developing right now is going to be used by your doctor in you know in the next decade. When you
come into the office and you're sick and the doctor is gonna be like all right,
you know, spit in this cup and I will put it into this magic machine which is the
sequencer and in an hour I can tell you what you have or what's wrong with you.
So if we're looking for a new virus, for example, we'll download a database of all
the viruses that are known and we'll search for, you know, our sequence of
interest against a whole database of all viruses. So you still need somebody to
analyze the data the computer is not smart enough yet. Our software helps people save energy and thereby reduce their carbon emissions. To date, we've saved over eight terawatt-hours which is the equivalent of about 1.1 million cars
on the road. When you're forecasting the wind there are so many different parameters that go into it it would be impossible for a human to sit down and
do all those calculations we need a computer
model in order to forecast it. I write software which scans images looking for bad images, images that we know are illegal. I work very closely with
organizations like the National Center for Missing children. I know that the
work that we've done has impacted a life of people and I feel very strongly about
it because there's a lot of social problems right now that could really
leverage the use of technology. It's a lot about empowering the people who are there to help in the world by giving them the tools to be able to do better. That's
something that we can do right now and the tools available are huge. The merging of art and technology is getting more and more significant now because computers and software such an integral part of our lives day to day. People are
realizing that it can be quite creative to take this medium of computers and
create incredible works of art. In "Finding Nemo" when Crush and Squirt and all the friends are flying through the East Australian current, you're seeing
images of water flowing by, you're seeing the colors on the back of the turtle,
you're seeing the sides of the fish -- all of those things are generated through
math and computer programs that we write that we then give to the artists and
they take that to to create that final image and tweak it and make it look
beautiful and look fun. The crux of it is really about invention. It's about looking at the world and and being dissatisfied with things and questioning
everything. I always felt like if I didn't learn how to program it it would be like not learning how to read, you know, the the future would just be closed to me. If you're in the coding profession there's so many things that you can do and you can pretty much pick and choose the course you want to be in. I think that, I mean you can start something in your college dorm room and you can have a set
of people who haven't built a big company before come together and build
something that a billion people use this part their daily lives this is just
crazy to think about her and it's really it's humbling it's amazing. Really it's about the chance to reinvent things and then see it out there in
the world and see people using it and having fun or having a better life
because of something that wasn't there before that you put in the world.
