[IP] Gates calls for more software research
Gates calls for more software research
By Martin LaMonica
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
http://news.com.com/2100-7343-5293764.html
Story last modified August 2, 2004, 1:26 PM PDT
Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates on Monday
called on the academic community to recruit more students into the
software field as the company introduced a $1 million fund for
university research.
Speaking at a meeting between Microsoft Research and about 400
academics at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters, Gates said attracting
the brightest minds in academia to work on software is vital to the
growth of the computing industry and the economy.
"It's a concern to all of us that computer science in many countries,
including the U.S., is not attracting as many people at the graduate
student level as it did in the past," Gates said.
Yet, with the exception of some fields of biology, software stands to
have the biggest impact on society as a whole, he said.
"The IQ ought to be coming almost entirely in our direction," Gates
said. "This is the place where the kind of advances that will drive the
economy will be coming from."
To help foster more academic research that dovetails with the work
done by Microsoft Research, the company on Monday unveiled a $1 million
endowment called the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship Program. Five
awards of $200,000 will be given out to new faculty members taking
novel approaches to computer science, Microsoft said. The winners will
be announced in the first quarter of next year.
Microsoft also announced the Phoenix Academic Program, a project to
address software engineering problems involving generating and
optimizing software code. Through the initiative, Microsoft will be
offering a software development kit that includes the software
compiler, code-named Phoenix, that will be used in future versions of
Microsoft products.
Research agenda
Microsoft's overall investment in research grants is in the tens of
millions of dollars, according to Richard Rashid, senior vice president
in charge of Microsoft Research. The research division, which employs
about 700 people in five centers around the world, has a budget of
roughly $6 billion this year.
During Gates' speech to researchers, he singled out a number of areas
in which Microsoft is devoting the company's research and development
dollars. In a tour of universities he took this spring, he found that
university researchers were tackling the same issues.
Gates said improving the security and reliability of software
continues to be a focus of his company's engineers. He said the company
is trying to improve the PC user experience by incorporating cameras
and by making "natural interfaces," such as speech recognition and
pen-based writing, more commonplace.
Microsoft is trying to make people who use the Microsoft Office
desktop application more productive with better collaborative tools and
the ability to gather data from radio frequency identification (RFID)
systems. Through the extensive use of modeling, Microsoft thinks that
it can make business applications become less expensive to run and
maintain, Gates said.
He also said wireless mesh networks can help address the relatively
high cost of high-speed networking. "We are on the verge of some pretty
substantial advances," Gates said.
Probing for products
Rather than pursue pure research, Microsoft Research has established
very close ties with the company's product groups. A number of research
initiatives, such as Microsoft's work in speech recognition and
electronic commerce, have been spun off as product lines or have
contributed technology to existing products, Rashid said.
Microsoft's spending on research continued to go up even during the
industry's 2000 to 2003 downturn, Rashid noted. He said a commitment to
innovation is a matter of company survival.
"One of things that we constantly need to be doing is moving the state
of the art forward and creating a treasure chest of technology that
will see the company through in the future," Rashid told CNET News.com
on Monday.
At a meeting with financial analysts last week, Gates said Microsoft
intends to substantially boost the number of patents for which it
applies to about 3,000 this year. Last year, it filed for 2,000. IBM
was awarded the highest number of patents last year in computer
science, winning 3,415 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office.
Academic outreach has been an important component to Microsoft's
research organization, Microsoft executives said Monday. The fifth
annual Faculty Summit is giving researchers in academia a view into the
work at Microsoft Research and the company's products.
In the past year, Microsoft has revamped its programs for working with
universities. The company is shifting its focus from working with
specific institutions to particular technologies, which should expand
the number of universities with which Microsoft works, said Sailesh
Chutani, director of the research unit's University Relations group.
IBM, another research powerhouse, is substantially upping its
commitment to working with the academic community. IBM last month said
it intends to start working with universities to develop computer
science curriculae around standards-based technologies such as Java
that IBM backs and open-source software such as Linux.
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