Microsoft Research Asia 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum Keynote Speech by Bill Gates

Submitted by Pinkbull on Wed, 08/13/2008 - 09:31.

MR GATES: Thank you. Well good evening. It’s very exciting to be here. As Harry said, we’ve been talking this for some time and I’ve definitely been looking forward to it. It’ll be a real privilege to share the stage later with the three Presidents of great universities here, all of which have been great partners to Microsoft, as well as providing us with some incredible people to do software breakthroughs.

I’ve had a wonderful trip this week. I started off by having a chance to go to the Olympic Games opening ceremony, and see a lot of those games which were fantastically managed. You know, it really a milestone, I think, and shows the world this opportunity to all work together and have places like Hong Kong and China will be such an important part of the future.

I also will get to spend some time here and see the Olympic events, and then go back up to Beijing and see more there. So, it’s a fun time, but tonight we get to talk about the thing I’m most interested in which is the way that innovation, properly managed, can change the world. And, I think, people are really underestimating both the importance of innovation and how it really is the answer to many of the tough challenges that we face. Innovation, of course, is very difficult to measure. It’s not like there’s some number that we come up with when we look at improved software, even improved medicine. But, in fact, those are the things that really have changed the world, and I would say the piece of that innovation is faster than ever before.

My history was that when I was young, in High School, computers were very difficult. People thought of them as very much a negative thing, something that was a tool of big Governments and big companies, and almost against the individual: they were very expensive; they would make mistakes; you could not fix their mistakes; they might not work favourably for you. Well that changed utterly with two big breakthroughs. One breakthrough was the ability to put the computer on a chip and make it inexpensively and that’s where companies like Intel and many others came in and performed that miracle. And then the second was the rethinking of software and building the software platform that allowed literally hundreds of thousands of new companies to be started to build innovative software. And Microsoft was lucky enough to be the company that had that vision and really create, for the early personal computers and then, later, for what was the IBM personal computer, that foundational software that let people write magic software.

The key think that happened there was that the more personal computers that got sold, both the hardware and software prices could come down. The hardware price because the scale economics of making chips allowed them to bring the price down while making them more powerful and, likewise, software, where you have a fixed cost of development - if you have more customers, then you can charge a much lower price and still have the opportunity to invest in the research and in constantly improving that software.

And, so, a phenomenon grew up around, first, Microsoft BASIC, then MS-DOS and then, by the mid-90s, Microsoft Windows where hundreds of thousands of companies were building on top of it. And that type of openness and that partnership created the phenomenon of personal computing.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration - although I’m biased - to say that the personal computer, particularly as it’s now been connected together through the Internet, is the best tool that mankind has ever created. And, after all, we’ve had many tools that magnify our manual capabilities but this is really an important tool, perhaps the first one since something like the Chinese invented printing, that takes our mental creativity and really multiplies that in this incredible way. And, if you look across the sciences today, you see what an important tool the computer, the Internet and software - which is really one set of things that work together as a system - you see how important that’s become.

You know, when we think now about advances in biology - that’s so much data. We need computers and software to understand that information. Even a field like astronomy, where you take data from many telescopes at different times and look at the universe and have ideas, it’s no longer just staring through an eyepiece; rather, it’s whatever theory you have, you have to test it against the data and software is very key to let you do that.

So, this original dream that the computer could change, I was 19 years old and my friend Paul Allen understood hardware better than I did and he got me to read about the chip and convinced me to drop out of school. I’m not here to recommend that, quite the opposite. Microsoft prefers people to finish their education and I think other companies have a similar view on that topic. And, anyway, college is a lot of fun. But Paul and I talked about being at the very beginning of the industry and so the first machine that we wrote the BASIC for was a very limited machine. It had 4k bytes of memory and, in fact, fitting the BASIC interpreter into that small space was probably one of the most fun craftsmanship things that I ever had a chance to do. It’s almost hard for me to adjust to how much memory machines have. I mean, back then, if somebody wasted five bytes of memory, it was very upsetting. You know, today, people waste five megabytes and they don’t even think about it: “Oh, it’s five megabytes, I’ll just waste it.” So, you have to adjust your mind to these exponential improvements and what kinds of things can be possible.

So, software has come a long way. There’s a lot of statistics we can talk about. About a billion people are using personal computers either at home or work and that’s a large number. Now, it’s short of six billion, which is the population of the planet, so, obviously, we still have more we can do in terms of bringing the price down and improving the relevance and the ease of use so that everyone, not only indirectly but directly, has access and can be doing great things.

The Internet usage, of course, is exploding. China now has the most number of broadband users anywhere in the world. Hong Kong, of course, has always been a leader in the availability of broadband and the quality of broadband and pioneered a lot of amazing things because of that. I think any of the statistics you look at: the mobile phone usage. And, of course, the mobile phone, which started out as not being a software-driven device - it started off as just purely a voice-type device - it, year by year, is becoming as much of a software-driven platform as the personal computer itself. The idea of looking at maps and looking at news and documents and having the information be presented to you or even more advanced ideas of how you interact with that device, the boundary between what’s a personal computer and what’s a phone, in the future, will not be such a black-and-white question.

In fact, particularly as we get screen technology where you can almost, you know, unfold or unroll the screen, then, at one time, you’ll be using a device as a small screen and then have a much larger screen that you can work with. Or, even if we don’t have that, you might use it as small screen but, then, when you are stationary, you can project onto a wall or onto any surface and have it as a large-screen device. So, the hardware innovativeness is taking the phone and making the very important because it’s so portable and so pervasive. And, so, of course, the entire software industry, including Microsoft is taking its ideas and applying it to that platform as well.

The personal computer, year by year, there’s more and more that we’ve been doing with it. You know, ten years ago, it was about printing out good-looking documents and the idea of typesetting. It was an amazing thing that a small company with a few employees could create a brochure that looked as good as a very large company. There used to be difference in what was possible there. Well, today, we think more about editing a movie and making it possible for somebody to edit a high-quality high-definition movie; you know, a kid in his bedroom making great multimedia with some creative idea being on an equal footing even with a big movie company that can afford to buy very expensive equipment.

And, so, the frontiers of software are constantly changing and that’s why this is an industry that’s so exciting. In fact, I’m envious of those of you who are young today and just entering into this new digital world and bringing your fresh ideas to what can be done here. The devices that will be software-driven won’t stop at the personal computer, the full-screen device or the pocket-sized device, the phone; it will really be pervasive. Your car will be software-driven. We’re already seeing some of that. Your TV set will simply be a screen that connects onto the Internet and so we’ll no longer have this separation between the Internet is where you can find lots of video and have variety and whereas broadcast TV is where you can find the most popular videos.

Now, we’ll bring the best of those together in a synthesised fashion. In fact, later, one of my colleagues will come up and demonstrate the idea of what that’s going to look like. So, everywhere we go, every surface will be able to turn into a display and the interaction will be far more natural. In fact, as we get things like ink-recognition and speech-recognition, everywhere you go the computer can be there helping out, listening to what you’re doing.

Now, to many of you, you know, that immediately, I’m sure sounds exciting; to others you think, “Well, what about privacy?” Well, that’s a very interesting software challenge, is how to design the system so that you can make guarantees to the user about how all that information that’s being acquired is handled.

You know, today, even with your cellphone, the mobile phone company actually understands not just who you call but everywhere you go and that’s the type of information that understanding who can access that, how it should be used, society’s going to have to have more explicit rules and then software breakthroughs that let us handle that in the right way.

So, this idea of how we interface with the machine, I would say that is the next thing that’s coming that people underestimate, what we broadly call natural user interface to encompass all the new interaction techniques: the touch, the speech, the vision. Even robotics which some people may think of as, “Well, isn’t that way off in the future?” The answer: really, no, it’s not. You know, robots that can drive cars, robots that can pick things up and understand visual scenes, again, it’s just breakthroughs in hardware which are definitely happening and breakthroughs in software. And it’s another case where Microsoft has a group of people who are out there working with universities, working with entrepreneurs and saying how can we bring our software expertise and make sure that that robotics industry gets off to a very rapid start.

And you can share the different work. If somebody has a vision system or a planning system or a camera system, all of those can interconnect. In fact, as the robots evolve, you don’t have to rebuild your applications. That kind of approach is exactly the same thing that happened in personal computing. And we are at a very early stage. We don’t really know where robots will be used broadly, but we know that those developments will take place.

We have another change in software which is that, when you have the Internet there, you don’t just have software running on one machine, you have the software running on multiple machines able to communicate with each other. And people often talk about this as the Internet service revolution, the fact that all the software can connect and so, when you write an application, instead of having to, say, recreate the map display capability, you simply make a call to a service - Microsoft’s one is called Virtual Earth but there’s others - who have these as well and get that information and we do the hard work and make that available to any piece of software that wants to get at it. And that’s driving the productivity so that you can specialise. It’s the basic idea of the subroutine call that we’ve always had in software but now connecting up to subroutines that are running on many different things.

So, the idea of connecting up across the Internet, we often call that computing in the cloud and that will eventually lead to machines that have lots of server capacity, lots of low-cost computing and low-cost storage and that will let us write software in an even more ambitious way, eliminate the last constraints we’ve had, that let us do these things.

Now, my optimism is actually evidenced by the kind of investments that Microsoft is making. We spend about $7 billion on research and development because we see these frontiers, we see these new opportunities. The part of that that I think has been the most exciting, as Dr Shum was mentioning, is the investment in research, the idea of bringing the best minds together, partnering up with great universities all over the world and pursuing these new ideas.

This type of research collaboration has already made a huge difference in Microsoft products: the quality of how Office works, the quality of how Windows works, the need for new security advances which are very challenging, our privacy; it’s the ideas of these researchers that are going to make sure that software evolves to meet those very demanding needs.

When I talk about university partnerships, of course, I’m talking specifically about the greatest universities everywhere and we’ve enjoyed a very strong relationship with the universities represented here tonight as well as the top universities in China, so we really are thinking of this in a global way. In fact, it’s amazing, you know, China and Hong Kong, I think, will represent a very substantial percentage of the innovation that’s taking place in these areas in the future. The interest of going into these subject areas is very, very high and a lot of the most talented kids are going into these areas.

Microsoft was fairly early to recognise the opportunity to be global, in particular, to have rich activities in China that would let us connect up to the nearby universities. Part of that came out of a visit I made in 1997 and so the decision to go ahead was made in 1998 and that’s why this year, through a series of events, we’ll kind of celebrate a decade, a decade of incredible success. You know, when we started the lab, we thought, “Okay, within four or five years, they’ll be doing great work.” Well, literally within a year, they were already making great contributions. And that’s, you know, as you get good people in a research lab, they attract other good people and so that kind of magic success breeding success definitely took place in a very big way.

Today, Dr Hon is the leader of Microsoft Research in Asia and they keep making incredible advances. We can see it not just in the product work but the papers that they bring out and the collaborations they have. Two of the people who ran the research lab before - he did, Dr Shum, who you’ve talked to tonight and Dr Zhang Ya Qin - are running very important groups in Microsoft and so taking key responsibility, whether it’s in China as a whole or, in Dr Shum’s case, taking one of our great competitive challenges which is to take search to a whole new level and leading an incredible team that’s doing great work there.

So, you know, I am very optimistic about the things that are going to come out of this. And part of that is the way we connect up to top talent. Since 1999, we’ve had 95 students from universities here in Hong Kong who’ve come and had internships in our research group and that’s been fantastic. They’ve done great things.

So, you know, ten years of amazing work, I can’t possibly describe all of it. But we talked about taking one piece and just giving you a glimpse of the kind of things going on and, so, we’ve got one of our top researchers is going to come up, Frank Soong, and show you a little bit of what a glimpse of what that TV experience will look like. So, let me welcome him to the stage and give you a sense of that.

PROF SOONG: Thank you very much.

And tonight I’m going to do a very small version of Bill’s grand talk which is actually the search and the TV, or Bill just mentioned the future of the TV is really Internet-connected. So, what we can do with that, especially with today’s search technology and especially with our group’s responsibility doing speech recognition since this is N-search. So, I’m going to show you a short demo to illustrate that effect.

And what we can do is really, in today’s Internet, video world, and can we do more than just watching TV, can we do actively watching, active watching while we are watching TV as a couch potato. So, let me play and assuming that rather than sitting in front of your PC, now you are watching, as a couch potato, holding your remote control. So, let’s see what we can do.

(Video programme played)

PROF SOONG: So we are watching this TV.

(Video programme played)

PROF SOONG: So you heard that magic word, “global warming” and, so, while you are sitting on the couch as a potato and can you still learn something whether going back to your PC? So, can we do something about it and can we do the search?

And, right now, the current search engine is very naïve or very primitive in doing video search. Can we do some video search? Right now, it’s very difficult. But, through audio track - usually, the video comes with the audio track - we can do some speech recognition. So, can we do something about it, by holding your remote control? Yes. So a search box can pop up and I can use my remote control to enter my query - “climate change” - so that’s my query, and so I’m waiting for the search result to come back. It’s grinding through the video clips, and try to find what’s there, related to climate change. So this is a typical output from our video search and you can see quite a few clips, and a long list of titles, along with the recognized -- speech recognized results. So you can go through all this recognized things which may or may not be 100% correct, or which may not be matching exactly with the climate change, but we can go through this script and snippets, and go through to see whether it is really something interesting. So, finally, right here, we saw the climate change.

COMPUTER: “This is about climate change, so we ask critique J R Jones the age-old Oscar questions.”

PROF SOONG: So you can see that those blue bars really tells you where we do the speech recognition, and got all those recognized result, and we can move …

COMPUTER: “To use the words climate change in the last State of the Union.”

PROF SOONG: So, it was even mentioned in the last State of the Union by the President Bush.

COMPUTER: “That is what gradually changing the climate.”

PROF SOONG: Some more.

COMPUTER: “It was a rise of temperature and a change of weather patterns, precipitation patterns.”

PROF SOONG: So, and now the couch potato is getting the flavour of study. So can we set up our personalized channel, for example, “climate change” is my current interest, I can make it as a customized search channel, or customize to make it channel 5, my personal search, so all the incoming videos through the internet will be fed or cued up in the -- on my TV and to be viewed later - or right now. And, of course, the personalized climate change needs some money, so you probably are more concerned how to get money to do the control, the global warming, so you ask the stock exchange where the money is, is our concern, and we set a previous channel, channel 4, about the New York stock exchange NYSE, and you can see all the cue up video, the title does not tell you too much, but if you want to search something in more detail and all those recognized things can give you in-depth, and so it helps you to find out exactly what’s inside the video. So, you can modify your New York stock exchange search to a New York stock exchange, the Microsoft and you see what happened.

COMPUTER: “The list of operating system, that’s the new Microsoft operating system and on that …”

COMPUTER: “Get up in the middle of the day. We haven’t heard many people say traders are underestimating the impact of Vista here. And here’s something important, building material stocks moved up rather dramatically here today, as Vulcan materials, which is the largest owner or aggregator of building materials in the United States, that’s sand and gravel, decided to buy Florida Rock and that’s certainly important because we saw Florida Rock move up almost 40%, the price is close to $68, that’s an amazing price to pay for it, and you can see the competitors like Texas and Eagle and Martin Marietta Strong. And, finally, is this the sign of the times or not. March index(?) the New York stock exchange reported just a few moments ago in a historic high, people are borrowing money to go out and invest in the stock market and, of course, Melissa, we’ve been reporting that for a while, we know the stock market’s popular once again, back …”

PROF SOONG: So just let me just add some post-mortem about my mis-control of the remote control. Basically, you see the bottom part is really a recommendation things, so rather than just continuously clicking your remote control, you can do some recommendation, ask your computer to do some recommendation for you. So all this - the bottom part and the -- try to monitor what you are watching and also do the speech recognition and to see what is the content, and also to tell you what’s going on. You may want to cue it up to watch it later. So this is, really, gives you a very small part of the innovation for the next 10 years, but I think with speech recognition with search and we can put the internet video at our hands to be educational, to be informational device, and thank you.

MR GATES: In our whole way that we interact with the computer will change dramatically, and we can’t say exactly what that will be. It’ll take lots of research, lots of usability, studies to try those things and, in particular, for young people who have grown up with these tools and, kind of, almost take them for granted, and I’m sure they’ll be coming up with some amazing ideas about that. Both through our work with universities and through some of the contest that we do, we’re trying to really stimulate the imagination of young people, after all, Paul Allen and I were quite young when we first had our ideas and we want to make sure we’re drawing people in and having them come up with great ideas. We have a competition called the Imagine Cup and it’s had over 200,000 students from each -- from over 100 countries participating in the one this year. Students from China and Hong Kong do very well, win a number of categories, but I’m sure you’re not too surprised about that.

We have different themes that we try. We’ve had themes about ecology, the environment, themes about people are handicapped and what software can do for them, and so getting people to think more broadly about software and how it’s going to be used in different ways is part of the idea there because that’s very, very important.

Now let me take this idea of how computing will help everyone and talk about one of the big challenges. In the market place, innovation of all types, whether it’s new medicines or new software, it’s very easy for the market place to respond solely to the needs of the wealthy consumers, and not fully take the needs of the less well-off into account. So if we think about the voice in the marketplace, the voice of the poorest, it’s actually fairly weak in that sense, and not so much in software, but definitely in medicines we can see great examples of that, after all the spending on drugs to deal with things like baldness have been about 10 times as great as the spending it on drugs to deal with something like malaria. And yet, in a purely, sort of rational sense, I think we’d all say that disease that kills over a million children a year probably deserves a priority over something that’s just about male aesthetics.

And so, you know, how can we make sure that we’re making an extra effort, whether it’s in cellphones or banking or software, or any of these areas of innovation, that we’re putting a little more energy into thinking about the needs of the poorest than we might, naturally, just by those pure price signals. Well, in fact, Microsoft research, particularly here in Asia - both in Beijing and a group we have in India, as well - have been very innovative in thinking about these challenges, going in and interviewing people, and not just assuming that the computer is the answer to their problems, but trying to think creatively about how things can done.

One of the solutions we came up with, actually, involves instead of video on the internet involves putting video onto DVDs, and so, for example, some of the best teaching courses - mathematics, or information about agricultural practices has been put onto DVDs and then made available. And so, a DVD is not quite a high-tech as the internet, and yet, in terms of practicality on how they impact, those projects have already proven that they can make a very big difference. And Microsoft has a number of things that are along these lines, the idea of making sure that every kid has a chance to come and use a machine connected to the internet. Well, if can’t be done in their home then it can be done in a community center, on in a library, or through a partnership with the Government, or somebody who does - a place that kids can come to, we want to make sure that the best software is there and that everybody has a chance because digital access is almost becoming literacy, something that every kid should have an opportunity to have access to. And there’s been price on that, you know, even here in Hong Kong there’s some very neat non-profit groups that we’ve teamed up with to make that possible.

So I hope you’re getting a clear sense from me that I’m quite optimistic about the future. There are some things we have to be careful about, making sure that these technology advances we understand exactly, the impact they’re having, but, overall, I’d say that whether it’s software or energy or agriculture, the promise of science which so many of you are going to have careers in, the promise of what you’ll be able to do during your careers is much greater than ever before and that’s why I’m so optimistic.

You know, I know that both Hong Kong and China will play an important part of that and that’s why Microsoft’s so committed to making sure we’re working in these areas and even my foundation is now finding great ideas and great examples and making sure those are spread throughout the world in terms of helping the poorest.

And, so, as we unleash your creativity, I’ll be very, very excited to see what you can do and rooting for your great ideas because I do think, with that, we can create an even better world. Thank you.

The above speach is sourced from Microsoft Research Asia website.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $3.6 billion to organizations working in global health; more than $2 billion to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $477 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $488 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns.

Microsoft^® Research Asia, referred to as "The World's Hottest Computer Lab" (MIT Technology Review, 2004), conducts cutting-edge fundamental research in computer science. As Microsoft's premier research lab in Asia Pacific, Microsoft Research Asia also aims at driving the usage of computers and the Internet and helping to foster healthy knowledge economies in the Asia Pacific region.

The "Microsoft Research Asia 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum" is to celebrate the lab's efforts on "turning ideas into reality" for the past decade. More importantly, it brings together some of the best visionaries in our time to explore new avenues for us to make a contribution to the world.

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Microsoft Research Asia 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum Keynote Speech by Bill Gates

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