I’m spending the morning at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, an annual conference sponsored by MSR. It’s an invitation-only conference attended by about 400 CS researchers from around the world.
I’m not going to blog the whole thing (I’m not even going to attend the whole thing, since I have some meetings that conflict), but I will blog the ones that are particularly notable, starting with the kick-off event—a dialog between Bill Gates and Maria Klawe, the dean of engineering at Princeton.
Klawe quotes statistics saying that the number of jobs in CS is growing, salaries are going up. (I need to find out where those numbers came from.)
(Gates wants to know why physical education is the fastest-growing field in higher ed.)
Klawe send a softball question to Gates—“Are you finding enough people to hire in the US?” His response is an emphatic “no.” He says it’s not hard to find project managers in the US, but it’s much harder to find excellent software engineers.
She asks him to describe the ideal engineering candidate. He says he wants more emphasis on the basic underlying mechanisms of computers and algorithms. Then he veers into selection process rather than preparation, talking about the success of the intern program. Mentions the intern dinner—apparently they bring in 300 per night, not everyone at once. He says that they ask sometimes about other companies, and then describes Google as “faddishly hot.”
K: What’s your position on how interdisciplinary CS studies should be? Should students be doing double majors and application-focused coursework?
G: There are still plenty of pure CS problems—in privacy, security, navigatio of information. (Hmmm…I wouldn’t call information navigation a “pure CS” problem.)
K: These problems will only be solved if people work on them. We need funding for students to do so.
Her son is going into CS, but her daughter doesn’t want to. One of the issues that stops a lot of women and minorities from wanting to study CS is the image of the career and perception of what a CS professional is like. She says she knows it’s an exciting field that requires interaction, communication. So, how can we create a more positive image for our profession? What is Microsoft doing?
G: Microsoft can set an example of what kind of jobs these are, and how interesting they are. He says MS can promise people that within 2 years they’ll have the opportunity to move beyond basic development roles. If people really understood the jobs, they’d feel differently. He says he just “doesn’t get it” as to why people don’t have more interest in these jobs.
K: Notes the increased number of women who have gone into medicine and law in her lifetime. Points out that during that time television shows and movies have glamorized those careers. Why don’t we have the same thing for CS?
G: Well, if you took a movie camera into one of our buildings, it wouldn’t be that interesting.
K: That’s true for all of those other fields, too!
moves on to next question
K: CS is the only field in science and engineering in which the participation of women has been dropping. What would be more effective in getting women into these fields?
G: Women need to be visible.
K: (frustrated) We are doing that. It’s not working! Things happening on the grass roots level aren’t working. Every woman in the field is doing this. There has to be another way to succeed at this.
G: (Seems at a loss for a moment.) Mentions studies showing that we lose women at every step of the pipeline, and the problem with not having reached critical mass. He asks—is this different in Asia?
K: No. A few countries have high participation. Ireland, possibly because of the prevalence of single-sex education. Turkey, because students aren’t given choices, they’re assigned.
(She’s going from a prepared script, which causes some of this to sound really stilted and programmed.)
K: What are the areas you’re most excited about?
G: What’s happening in MSR is the most exciting, and the most interesting part of his job. TechFest is one of the “funnest” things on the Microsoft calendar. The TabletPC is cool; eventually every student will have one.
[… lost focus for a bit; I’m watchign this on a video screen, which is less engaging than having a real person up there …]
Ben Shneiderman does a very long statement-in-the-form-of-a-question, and claims that the ocmputing fields have the highest level of introversion, which Gates and Rashid dispute. (Rashid seems to be confusing introversion with isolation, arguing that software teams have to work together.)
Rashid points out that the social and media tools that kids are using now (iPods, IM, cell phones, etc) are tools created by computer scientists—why don’t kids want to be involved in creating them and making them better?
(decided I needed coffee at this point, so missed the rest of the q & a)
Of note following the dialog: several new RFPs being announced today:
Later this year:
Also coming: “institutes” with deep msr collaboration, 3-year commitment, IP agreement. Topics being considered are mobile phones, bioinformatics, and robotics. More information will be forthcoming, but details are not yet available.
Upcoming workshops include gaming technologies in education, and Tablet PC in education. Dates not yet finalized.
This afternoon’s keynote is by William Wulf, of the National Research Council and the National Academy of Engineering. Says he’s going to talk about societal issues rather than technical issues.
[While this was geared towards a CS audience, I’d encourage a broader audience to read my notes, below the fold…it gives a distressing (to me, at least) view of how distorted an engineering world view can become. I’m off to the conference dinner cruise, so I’m going to post this as-is; I’ll clean it up a bit tomorrow.]
Says an important part of their job is “telling [sic] truth to power,” which first involves finding out what the truth is. (Clearly these are not social scientists.) They put together a team that studies a topic for an average of 18 months, and produce the equivalent of a phd dissertation, complete with bibliography. They’re not interested in people’s opinions, he says, they’re only interested in “fact.” The kicker—they produce one of these reports every day.
Their customers are typically government agencies (mostly federal), although they sometimes undertake a study without being asked.
Most of the questions are aobut the state of knowledge in some specific area of science to inform a public policy decision. So, for example, what would the implications of changing the CAFE standards? Nearly a third of recent research has been related to counterterrorism. They also do a good bit of research on environmental issues—cites a recent report on “the hydrogen economy.”
Four things on his “bully pulpit” list:
Refers to Friedman’s The World is Flat, which argues that the playing field is becoming more level, and that outsourcing is a manifestation of that fact. (I’d be more interested in seeing references to Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind in this context.) He says Friedman lists ten “flatteners” that have enabled this levleing of the eocnomic playing field. Nine of the ten are either IT or enabled by IT—the only one not related to IT was 9/11. So, Wulf says, it’s the people here in this room that created the potential for this flattening of the world. Like Friedman, he sees this change as a good thing—lowering costs for the US and increasing opportunities in countries like India.
“Whether flatness is good for any particular country depends on how that country prepares itself for the rough and tumble of this flat world.” Friedman argues that the US has not been preparing itself and its children properly.
Notes that every industry involving information has been transformed fundamentally by IT—it seems likely that this will be true of higher ed, as well. The question is, in what way will higher ed be changed?
(I’m reminded of Pat Cadigan’s presentation at an ALA conference some years ago, where she cautioned us about “the danger of predicing the future in a straight line.”)
Says that someone (missed who) said he had never seen a process that couldn’t be sped up by a factor of two while increasing quality. (Um…pregnancy comes to mind as one counter-example.) Asks “Can we imagine a system that would speed up higher educationby a factor of two while simultaneously increasing quality.” (This kind of mechanistic approach to problem solving always frightens me. It’s not possible to reduce everything, and particularly not social systems, to an engineering process.)
He argues that despite this increasingly technological society, the majority of the voting public are technologically illiterate, and are not fit to be governing this society. “I worry a lot more aobut the people with liberal arts degrees who are technologically illiterate.” He says they’re “not equipped to vote.” (I’m in the “Microsoft employee video ghetto,” so I can’t see what the reaction to this statement is in the other room, but I’m appalled by this arrogance—first, the assumption that liberal arts majors are technologically illiterate, and second, the assumption that technological skill is a necessary component for political participation.)
Goes on to ask if we can enable a system that would enable the general public to inform themselves about the nature of a public policy debate, in “a fairly dispassionate, true (his emphasis) way.” (Unbelievable. Who gets to decide “truth,” I wonder?)
Argues that we’re outsourcing technology work not because the people overseas are cheaper, but because they’re better. (And what does he base that assessment on?)
Asks why, when innovation is American’s strongest capability, we’re cutting funding for basic research—across the board. It takes years to go from basic research to implementation. We’re emptying the pipeline, and we’ll pay a price down the line. (One of the few things he’s said that I agree with.)
Cites a statistic that NRC found that the average age for a researcher to receive their first grant as PI (not co-PI, postdoc, etc) is 42. Says that when you fund people that late, you won’t get he kind of courageous, ground-breaking research that you need for innovation. (Great. He’s now dismissed my undergraduate BA, and my age. I suppose I should be grateful that he hasn’t started in on gender.)
Says “We need to carry Bush’s message to Congress.” Asserts that we are not ‘entitled’ to research support. Research is a means to an end, and we need to focus on what those ends are.
A reporter asked him today “Will we still have the best universities in the world in 20 years?” He says he doesn’t know, but that we’re shaping the answer to that question right now.
A question from the audience about the letter from Senator Joe Barton to a Professor Michael Mann, in which Barton challenges Mann’s climate change research and demands supporting evidence. I don’t know much about this issue, but after skimming some information online here and here, I’m appalled by what seems going on.
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