Bill Gates talk at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin)
Bill Gates came to meet Computer Science and Computer Engineering students. Here is the video http://cns.utexas.edu/communications/2008/02/gates_talk.asp
The talk was mostly technical about the next problems facing the world and software solutions to it. He showed a functionality of Microsoft Research software HDView http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView/HDabout.htm to move through the parts of a rat's brain visualization. The most funny and general part of his talk was his cool spoofy video of retiring and trying different things. The video featured who's who of everybody in all trades: Hillary, Obama from politics, Matthew Mcconno*, George Clooney, etc from showbiz, and singers and rock stars as well. He did emphasize that he is going to move from full-time of microsoft to part-time and devote more time on his foundation from summer.
He noted a few important research directions. In 2008 there are now a billion computers and a billion cellphones. Even though Moore's law is not as effective now, we got a workaround with multi-cores while disk storage has been increasing and will continue to increase. He noted the research in content based video search where you listen only to the part you are interested. In UI, he stressed towards natural interface with speech recognition being used more than now. He also said (which I didn't know) that speech recognition was considered an easy problem in the sixties and still people are working on it and the problem is still open. The point being nobody knows how much time it will take to solve each problem, nevertheless we know we are progressing. In ubiquitous computing, Gates mentioned cloud, around computing, TV on internet and the need for all applications to work even when moving between devices.
I appreciate that Gates acknowledged Microsoft using AT&T and Xerox research (for GUI and mouse) initially, however, Microsoft started its own research (MSR) in 1993 when it had money for it. While talking about research Gates said collaboration with Universities is an important aspect (well, he was inside a top-ten University for CS!) and talked about collaboration with Lipman of Center for Brain Science at Harvard. While a rat brain is only a thousand petabytes human brain is a million petabytes. Thus, modeling a rat brain first he showed HDView software module doing visualization. Gates was fortunate to get access to have access to program a machine at young age (at 100 baud link :-), utilizing which he could start Microsoft at young age of 17. Dream Spark allows sharing MS software with students and Imagine Cup now has 150k students. Gates was ignorant of world's biggest problems when he was at Harvard (well he dropped out, but he was there :-) Even now half a million die every year of avoidable diseases like malaria. These are people with no money and thus no voice in the market. The amount of money spent on finding solution to malaria is one-tenth of that is spent on baldness and baldness is not known to killed anybody as of yet. Therefore, market is not working good for everybody. This is a place where capitalism fundamentals fail and thus philanthropy comes in. Of course, there are Govt policies that need to be worked with too. A bunch of farmers shown a dvd of best farming practices picked up very fast and quickly implemented it. So, sometimes even a small step is good enough. Gates said: "Don't be naive as I was!" The bottom 2 billion is what Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is targeting at with half on diseases, a quarter on education and last quarter on microfinance and communities.
Moore opened the talk for students to ask direct questions to Gates, students asked really interesting questions and got interesting replies.
I used to get x error on Windows XP, now I am going to upgrade to Vista. What will happen to the applications.
Gates: "I guarantee you will get a different error message"
Do u actually code?
"The last thing I wrote all of code from end to end was RadioShack Model 100 which had 32k bytes memory at that time. I used to code in Machine Language, but now I write prototype code in F#, functional language and C#. Given current state, I would write most code now in C#."
The talk was mostly technical about the next problems facing the world and software solutions to it. He showed a functionality of Microsoft Research software HDView http://research.microsoft.com
He noted a few important research directions. In 2008 there are now a billion computers and a billion cellphones. Even though Moore's law is not as effective now, we got a workaround with multi-cores while disk storage has been increasing and will continue to increase. He noted the research in content based video search where you listen only to the part you are interested. In UI, he stressed towards natural interface with speech recognition being used more than now. He also said (which I didn't know) that speech recognition was considered an easy problem in the sixties and still people are working on it and the problem is still open. The point being nobody knows how much time it will take to solve each problem, nevertheless we know we are progressing. In ubiquitous computing, Gates mentioned cloud, around computing, TV on internet and the need for all applications to work even when moving between devices.
I appreciate that Gates acknowledged Microsoft using AT&T and Xerox research (for GUI and mouse) initially, however, Microsoft started its own research (MSR) in 1993 when it had money for it. While talking about research Gates said collaboration with Universities is an important aspect (well, he was inside a top-ten University for CS!) and talked about collaboration with Lipman of Center for Brain Science at Harvard. While a rat brain is only a thousand petabytes human brain is a million petabytes. Thus, modeling a rat brain first he showed HDView software module doing visualization. Gates was fortunate to get access to have access to program a machine at young age (at 100 baud link :-), utilizing which he could start Microsoft at young age of 17. Dream Spark allows sharing MS software with students and Imagine Cup now has 150k students. Gates was ignorant of world's biggest problems when he was at Harvard (well he dropped out, but he was there :-) Even now half a million die every year of avoidable diseases like malaria. These are people with no money and thus no voice in the market. The amount of money spent on finding solution to malaria is one-tenth of that is spent on baldness and baldness is not known to killed anybody as of yet. Therefore, market is not working good for everybody. This is a place where capitalism fundamentals fail and thus philanthropy comes in. Of course, there are Govt policies that need to be worked with too. A bunch of farmers shown a dvd of best farming practices picked up very fast and quickly implemented it. So, sometimes even a small step is good enough. Gates said: "Don't be naive as I was!" The bottom 2 billion is what Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is targeting at with half on diseases, a quarter on education and last quarter on microfinance and communities.
Moore opened the talk for students to ask direct questions to Gates, students asked really interesting questions and got interesting replies.
I used to get x error on Windows XP, now I am going to upgrade to Vista. What will happen to the applications.
Gates: "I guarantee you will get a different error message"
Do u actually code?
"The last thing I wrote all of code from end to end was RadioShack Model 100 which had 32k bytes memory at that time. I used to code in Machine Language, but now I write prototype code in F#, functional language and C#. Given current state, I would write most code now in C#."
posted by Aditya Saurabh at 9:25 PM
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