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.