Gates: 'We need more software research'

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 $1m 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 US, 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 $1m 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.

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 $6bn 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 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.

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com