比尔·盖茨,卡内基梅隆大学演讲，2009年

Please join mein welcoming back Bill Gates. Thank you. Thanks very much. I am excited to behere as part of this dedication for the New Gates Center. It's an honor and aprivilege to have been involved. There's a great number of people who've madethis possible, starting with Carnegie Mellon, President Jerry Cohen and S'amuseBoard of Trustees, their vision and their support, as well as the thoughts ofProfessor Gae Blaylock, who traveled across the country to gather ideas fromsuccessful academic buildings to ensure that both the gates in Helmand centreswould meet the demanding goals laid out. Clearly they did a great job and wesee it before us today. I'd like to quickly think Henry and Li's Hellman forbeing essentially partners together and getting this area to be so fantastic. Anumber of other people have been key to this, including more than twentyMicrosoft employees. And it's really no accident that that came together. Thelink between Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon has always been very strong and the listof distinguished alumni and professors have been a key part of Microsoft.Success has also long including Bric raschid, and who got up on a Bloom andHarry Shum. Many of these people provided significant donations to help withthe building, and I know they are thrilled to give back to see him you for theimportant role it played in their careers. If anything, the connection betweenMicrosoft and Cmu is stronger than ever. They're working together on a widerange of projects spanning some of the most ambitious and exciting things inall of computer science. There is also a strong foundation, a connectionbetween the Gates Foundation and see him you are one of those is that there'sover a dozen gates millennium Scholars here and I had a chance to meet withthem and talk about their great work. Earlier today. Another example is aproject on learning. This is the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative. AndI think this is an amazing and a critical piece of work. The idea is to useonline interactive material to adapt to the student to see what the studentsconfused with. so the student immediately knows what their understanding andwhat they're not. so the teacher can see how they're doing. explaining thecomplex concepts and dynamically adapt the in classroom time to make sure thatthe right things are covered. Also, the course itself, by being online andmeasured can be in a state of constant improvement. The idea of these virtuallabs and intelligent tutoring systems, I think, can really revolutionize educationand we need to revolutionize education. No today, more than ever, if we look atthe quality of education that most students in this country receive, it's very,very poor. The experience that you've had before you came to see him you. andof course here at Cmu itself is unfortunately the exception rather than therule, and as we think about technology and all of the things that'srevolutionized, buying airplane tickets and looking at DNA data. I think it'sperhaps most amazing how little so far it's changed. The practice of educationitself and yet in terms of empowering people to achieve their potential, notjust in the United States but in the world as a whole, having great teachershaving a great education is one of the most critical things we need goingforward. And so I believe that by taking the work being done here, I'm bringingit together with videos of the great professors, bringing it together with lotsof data that analyze what's going on in different school systems, making itfreely available out on the Internet for constant improvement. I believe thateducation can be radically improved, and so any student wants to learnsomething, either in a classroom type environment or on a purely onlineenvironment, that that should be possible. and so it's great to see theambition taking place in this particular project that the foundation is helpingto fund all right now. There are forty Community colleges that are partneredwith that project, actually putting these courses to work and making their contributionsto making them better. Pioneering work in computer science course has beengoing on here for over half a century, and it was great to see some of thehighlights of the big, bold contributions that have been made. I think this isgoing to not only continue, but accelerate the potential for using computing,particularly in some of these cross disciplinary areas like computationalbiology are the promise is greater than ever. A robotics is a fantastic exampleof this, whether it's learning or vision speech recognition, I cannot gomodeling. All of these things really get pushed to the state of the art andseeing you has been a huge leader in this and it was fun to meet one of cm usea latest robots. I was told that next time I come, it'll give me a tour aroundthe building and it was very polite to me, and they said it would go get coffeefor me, but we didn't actually try that out. So there's real progress beingmade more and more ambition. In fact, if we think of a lot of societal problemsin terms of health care, you know an elderly population. Many of these, If wethink a decade in two decades out of the role of of robots in helping to dealwith those problems and continue to improve, the quality of life, I think canbe very strong. There's some amazing people who do this robotics work,including Red Whitaker Manuela Veloso, Matt Mason and in many others. And wereally appreciate the connection that exists between Microsoft, who is alsoworking on robotics and very optimistic about these things in the way thatwe're working together on the center for innovative robotics. And I think withthe right leadership, we bring everybody in the world together to learn, to tryand about ambitious new things. And I think people will be very surprised atthe pace of progress and robotics, even very tough problems like being able tohelp move a patient medicine you know, in ten or twenty years, I think it'svery possible that we'll have those things. Language technologies will beanother area where you'd pick where a Carnegie Mellon has been very much out infront, even going back to the original hidden Markov work that I was in onethousand, nine hundred and seventy four. This school has stayed at theforefront of that with a lot of speech activity. In fact, I think if you tookany group at Microsoft and said what had the highest percentage cmu graduates,it might be harder our speech recognition group. and, of course, the work herecontinues to push the forefront. It turns out, many of these problems are muchmore challenging than we thought, and that makes them more interesting, moremore fascinating, and there really is a pretty incredible progress. I saw todaya very clever technique that's been used to help the machine translation.Engage humans in assisting to show how article should be translating. And thenthat base of data is there to help with the machine approach that over time, Ithink can be very, very good and we can look into the future and expect thatour cell phone, I will be able to talk to it. You know, Ask it questions, tellit to schedule something that's going to be common sense, and that I'd say ison an even nearer term prize. and perhaps in five years, certainly Microsoft,Google. Many others are putting that out for various narrow applications today,and there is every reason to expect that it'll get even broader somewhere inthe midst of an incredible transformation where computer science, including thework here, is sitting in a central role. and if you think about well, what'sbiology about what a lot of it's about? analyzing DNA and protein expressionand finding patterns that only a rich software approach. I will make possiblenow, when we think about learning. computer science is at the center of that.When we think about modeling new materials, we think about making new vaccines.All of those things, a software element is stronger than before. Eventually,with this genomic data, we will be able to solve a very top medical problemsand one of the diseases I spend a lot of time learning about and hoping that wecan make progress on its malaria. Today, over a million people a year die ofmalaria. That's mostly children in Africa. Malaria at one time was spread overalmost the entire globe. In fact, even in northern United States there was malariaand there was a lot of malaria down in the South, while in fact, fortunately itdidn't have a strong hold if you got that far north. and so the invention ofDDT is an insecticide in the application that actually eliminated it. and weonly think about malaria today, when we travel into those regions.Unfortunately, what that meant is that the focus of investing on thatparticular diseases has been very low. But there's reasons to be optimistic andadvances in modeling drugs modeling vaccines will help us get. There. Also weremodeling the disease itself on techniques that come out of physics of modeling.Actually, let us look at various factors, like the types of vector in theweather and understand what new tools will mean bed nets, medicines, indoor spraying,that will let us reduce the mayor of malarial map very dramatically, and so youwouldn't normally make a connection between malaria in those million lives ayear and the need for advances in software. But in fact, that connection isvery strong and you can expect to see a great progress because of the kind oftechnology that's worked on here. Also, we look at a top problem like energyand I spent yesterday in Washington D C at the Department of Energy trying tounderstand the complex politics of various things like a cap and trade bill.But in fact, if you zoom out and think you know, how can we have it all? Howcan we have developing nations experienced a kind of lifestyles that were usedto have our lifestyles advance? The fact is, it's innovation, innovation inmaterial science for solar thermal, for sort of solar volatile to take modelingapproaches for new nuclear designs, it would be radically different and avoidsome of those problems. And again we come back to computer science and some ofthe very advanced we're going on. It is very possible and I'm optimistic to sayit's likely that over the next two decades will get energy approaches that notjust meat and environmental constraints of not putting out greenhouse gases,but also that meets the constraint of being less expensive. because the onlyway to help the poorest is to bring the cost of energy down from what it istoday. That's transport. that's fertilizer. that's clean water. It's theempowerment for them to live the lifestyles that we take for granted, and sothey're the central role of software's, providing something that's important.So we're going to see some great things in the years ahead. Some of theseadvances are being developed here at Carnegie Mellon. Right now others will comealong as we get new generations of students here in this facility, takingadvantage of what were dedicating today. so I'm always inspired when I comehere. I'm inspired by the great minds that are here and the ones that will becoming here, and I'm inspired by the opportunities to do work. That's both funand interesting, but also makes a big difference not just in the United States,but to the world. His whole as a whole. So I'll be following your work and Ican't wait to see these great advances that are delivered in the the progressthat will enable. Thank you.

So why isthat?.Bill Gates is able to answer some questions. I asked that people who wantto ask questions and I encourage you to do so to come up and use these twomicrophones and we'll have a session here. Right here? Mining honestly, ensuiteall and I am a Phd student studying computer science education and how peoplelearn about computers with the amount of great work that your foundation doesin terms of bringing education to urban schools and the less privilegedchildren. How do you see computing literacy for our next generation as they tryand reach towards Carnegie Mellon? Well, certainly in rich countries like theUnited States, the opportunity to use computers and be familiar and comfortablewith them and to actually have them be a key part of the educational process isreally become like reading literacy itself. That's something that we've got tomake sure is available to everyone, our best ally in doing. that is that theprice of computers continue to come down and the price of connectivitycontinues to come down. If you buy, say, a netbook type computer for a couplehundred dollars, you're lucky enough to be in a place with why FAI access usethat computer over a number of years, particularly if they can avoid you'rehaving to buy textbooks. You're already at the point where it's a net. Savingsfor the students were those four or five textbooks, and we've got to get alittle more work to get that done. but you're not a head. one of my favoriteprojects that the foundation did. I was working with the over fifty thousandlibraries in the United States and helping to provide computer hardware. butnot just the hardware, the right software on the training. And when we embarkedon that we did a pilot project town in Alabama. We wondered if the librarian'swould embrace it. You know, this is a strange machine and you know it was justkids coming in to do something, and you know, how do you deal with the thing itbreaks and people stand in line, but in fact, by really learning and workingwith them, we were able to get an incredible reception. In fact, it's reallyrevitalize the libraries in rural areas even more so than in urban areas. Butin Bolt, I'd say. And so that's that's been very successful and it's beenmaintained over time. so the kid doesn't have its own machine. it's communitycenters, libraries, schools. There ought to be ways that you can get access,and that's an important threshold, because it's only when we make thatassumption that these interactive learning tools like the Carnegie Mellononline initiative. It's only then that you can require those and actually maybeeven reduced the time in class and the interactive learning to be part of that.So getting pervasive access is is an enabling factor.

My name isThomas right,.I may freshmen in the school of computer science on this sort ofties in with her earlier question How do you feel about the open software arethe open source software project? and what are some of your personal experiencesin that? Well, clearly, there's been free software. All they have always beenfor free software. There always will be free software and the great thing aboutall marketplaces as you get this dynamic, where somebody wants to go off andstart a company and pay salaries for people that's good thing, they pay, taxes,create jobs and so that software they have to make it better than one andseveral free and being able to charge for that. Hopefully, the people who usewhatever great work they do every once in a while will pay them so they can paytheir salaries. and then at the same time, you have things that are done forfree here. The original UNIX system, done out of Bell Labs, was a free piece ofsoftware. and everybody looked at that benefited from that. there's variousdescendants of that that are used. The original browser University of Illinoispiece of work was a pretty piece of software. Now that never got much usagebecause it was a small scale team that in it it was actually more larger projectsthat came along later that actually move that thing for it. So you have a verypositive dynamic. It's a market type system where, depending on the category ofsoftware, you'll either have the really expensive stop the Met expensive stop.The cheap stuff for the free stuff will have different shares. If you go to acorporation and look at the database they use, they typically use a fairlyexpensive piece of software for that, if you go and look at consumers and andthen you get more down to lower end, so it's a very healthy dynamic. I do thinkthat in time you won't, it won't tilt in the sense. I do think that there willbe jobs working as a software person which will be supported by the commercialelement that is part of this dynamic mix.