Saturday, February 28, 2004

I think the high-order bit for me from the university tour with Bill is that I'm deeply appreciative of the faculty, staff and students for making this such a great trip. It took a lot of work on the part of the schools to prepare for this, and it all came off flawlessly. The conversations were all great, and it was clear that an enormous amount of thought and preparation had gone into every discussion and every question. I went into this with a deep respect for academia; I left with that respect magnified many times over. 1:52:38 PM    ; comment [];  There were a small handful of themes that regularly occurred in our conversations with faculty and administrators. The one that loomed largest, and in a real sense was the impetus for the tour in the first place, is the role of computer science moving forward. In the US, enrollment in computer science programs has been trending downward. A big theme of Bill's speech, and our conversations with faculty, is that this trend is a real paradox, because there are only two fields that will have a huge impact on our world in the next 10-20 years: biotech and computing. And biotech's impact is being driven by computing. So when you get into the details of it -- and this came out again and again in our conversations -- you find out that there are as many people involved in computer science in academia as there ever were, and in fact in most cases it's seeing tremendous growth. However, an increasing number of people are doing computer science outside of the computer science department, because they see all the other places "where the action is". We saw and heard about great computer science work in physics, biology, chemistry, public health, b-schools, economics, you name it. Universities are not of one mind on what to do about it. Some are fighting it, and trying to attract the smartest computer science students back into the CS program. Others are actively embracing it and trying to grow cross-disciplinary programs. One university we visited even has a "Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science" who administers over a set of faculty whose appointments are to schools and departments spread all over the university. Programs are getting re-shaped everywhere, and in many cases this is causing a real identity crisis. Which is it: computational biology, or bioinformatics? The fear at first was that computer science would become the servant of all the other disciplines; however, what some schools are seeing is that in the cross-discipline research efforts, often the computer scientists are emerging as the lead researchers on the projects. Things are going to look very different in 5-10 years.  I honestly can't tell you what a CS department will look like. But the very good news here is that computer science is alive and well, and in fact there is an energy and enthusiasm in the field that I have not felt for a long time, and a recognition that computing will have a huge impact on the world in almost every field of endeavor. 12:19:29 PM    ; comment [];  I sincerely wanted to blog from the road during the university tour with Bill, but two things prevented me. 1. There was never any time. We did five schools in two and a half days. On a good night, I got five hours of sleep. When were were visiting a school, when I wasn't physically in a meeting or presentation, I was prepping for the next school we were visiting. 2. Security. Let's be honest here: Bill's a rich and powerful guy, and there are lots of people who wish him ill-will. There is a very small number of people who know the exact details of his itinerary and the security plans. Even travelling with him, I didn't know most of it. The cardinal rule of security precautions is "Don't talk about your security precautions." I tried to ask as few questions as I possibly could, and just stick with what I needed to know so I could be in the right place at the right time and not be in the way, but I didn't want to write about it while it was still going on, just to make sure I didn't give away anything I wasn't supposed to. I feel very privileged that I got to do this -- both that the universities students and faculty welcomed us so openly, and that I got to travel with Bill for three days. I've been in dozens of meetings with Bill, but this is the first time I've travelled with him. 12:03:50 PM    ; comment [];  I've been reading blog comments from students about Bill's visits to college campuses. There is a lot of confusion about open source and MS's views, so I thought I would elaborate a bit. First, you really need to make a distinction between open source in general and the GPL. In fact, there are really three general classes of software distribution: closed source/proprietary, open/free where you give away the source code and people can use it any way they like without restriction (e.g. FreeBSD-style license) and viral/e.g. GPL where if you use any of the source you are required to make all of your source available under the same terms. Microsoft doesn't have a problem with the second (open with no restrictions). Most of the software we build will never be shipped out in this way (though MSR certainly does make a lot of things available under freeBSD-style terms), but it's fine and very appropriate for publishing a lot of research work. Even better, if we or someone else (including the government) fund research in universities, and the results get published in a truly open way, it means we and all of our competitors can use the results too, which is great. Microsoft's big objection is with the GPL, because it has a complete impedance mismatch with proprietary code. We would absolutely like people to stop using the GPL, and it scares us that a lot of people blindly release their software under the GPL without understanding that they are limiting the future use of their software even more than if they keep it proprietary and license it for money. Now lots of people disagree with this point of view. That's fine, and one of the nice things about academia is that it's a great environment for raising opposing points of views and discussing them in an open forum.  The important thing I want to get clear though is that Microsoft is not against open source; it's against the blind, uninformed adoption of viral licensing schemes, and in particular the GPL. 11:48:21 AM    ; comment [];  I didn't mean to have such a long hiatus... but I spent the week with Bill on his 5-university tour. I have pages and pages of notes I need to compile, and I slept over 10 hours last night (on a good night on the tour, I got 5 hours of sleep).  I'll write more later today; it was a fascinating experience. All 5 universities were incredibly welcoming, and the students and faculty asked great, thoughtful, hard questions, which made it even more fun and completely worthwhile. 11:37:40 AM    ; comment [];

© Copyright 2004 Kevin Schofield. Last update: 8/23/2004; 10:09:10 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.

Blogroll

Robert Scoble
Ross Mayfield
Dan Gillmor
Larry Lessig
Joi Ito
misbehaving.net
simplegeek
Ray Ozzie
Doc Searls
Boing Boing Blog
Paul Andrews
Chris Pirillo
Halley's Comment
Instapundit
Scripting News
Beyond the Beyond
Don Box
Mary Jo Foley
WebMink
Dean for America
kuro5hin
John Batelle
PDA and Tablet PC News
AlwaysOn Network
The Old New Thing
PR Opinions
Critical Section
Backup Brain
Seattle P-I Microsoft Blog

Books I Like

The Diamond Age
Cryptonomicon
The Tipping Point
The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design
The Design of Everyday Things
Contact
Earth
The Mythical Man-Month
Peopleware
Wicked French
Linked: The New Science of Networks
As the Future Catches You
Pattern Recognition
The Da Vinci Code
The Man who Stayed Behind
Angels and Demons
The Confusion
Quicksilver
Free Prize Inside


What I'm Reading Now

Bachelors Brothers Bed & Breakfast Pillow Book