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Tuesday, May 10, 2005 |
Whew. I feel like I'm finally getting caught up on all the big stuff that's been happening.
In one killer week, we had the Social Computing Symposium, the INRIA announcement with Steve Ballmer in Paris, and our MSR roadshow in DC featuring the panel session with Bill Gates and Rick Rashid. Plus, that turned out to be the week that the HB 1515 legislation issue caught fire, and the week when Steve Ballmer met with the competition commissioner in Brussels. A slow news week for the company -- not.
I'm enjoying not travelling and spending lots of quality time with my daughters -- I'm at home for two more weeks before I fly to Toronto to give a talk. My kids' school play is this weekend ("You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" -- very funny stuff) and this seems to be the time of the school year when all their teachers have realized that the end is quickly approaching and they need to cram some more work in, so the homework is piling up. I'm discovering that my high school geometry is very, very rusty. OK, that's overstating it: honestly, I don't remember any of it. That makes it hard to help my panicked daughters late at night when they're stuck. But I keep trying, figuring that if I learn it then (I got an A) I can re-learn it now.
And now I'm even caught up on my blog. Sleep calls.
10:53:58 PM 
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The last week of April, we held the second annual Social Computing Symposium here in Redmond. Fantastic people, fantastic talks. We videotaped all the talks, and are in the process of getting them all posted for the world to see. Lots of good blogging on the symposium and the talks.
Last year there was a real tension between the "industry" folks and the "research" folks. There wasn't that tension this year. I think the whole social computing phenomenon has received a serious reality check in the last year, and I think everyone has the same realization that we still understand very little about what's going on out there. So it brought a sense of humility and eagerness to learn to everyone.
And the best part: I got to attend almost the entire symposium, something which my role as "ineffectual suck-up middle manager" usually doens't allow.
10:40:22 PM
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Last week Microsoft announced a new program to encourage licensing of intellectual property developed inside Microsoft (including, but not limited to MSR) to small businesses and startups.
They even launched a special web site to showcase some of the technologies that are available.
This is totally cool. We do an amazing amount of tech transfer from MSR into our product groups, but there are always things that don't quite match up to a product group's needs or are serendipitous discoveries along the way. There are also cases where Microsoft may choose to license technologies (like ClearType) that actually have shipped in products. It's actually a pretty open field, and the team that is running this program is open to all sorts of discussions beyond things that we are particularly showcasing.
The press reports have been pretty positive on the effort, though some got the story a bit wrong and wrote that this was some sort of free giveaway, a la IBM's announcement a few months ago that they were making 500 patents available to the open source community (it's unclear which ones or how they picked them, or for that matter whether anyone would pay to license them anyway). By the way, Microsoft has a standing policy that it will make its entire patent portfolio available under royalty-free licenses to academic institutions for noncommercial research and educational purposes.
Some other people thought that only MSR was involved (it's broader than that), or that this was just "spare" technology (not true). And interestingly enough, we've licensed technology externally before; what's really new about this program is specific outreach and business development around licensing to small businesses and startups, with the cooperation of VC's.
I think this is going to be a great program, an a real win-win for everyone.
10:26:17 PM
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The day before the DC event, Microsoft Research Cambridge announced that it is partnering with INRIA, the French national research center, to create the Microsoft-INRIA Institute for Computational Science, through which researchers from both groups will collaborate on specific projects around e-science and some other computer science areas.
There was some concern that this meant that INRIA was giving up some of its academic freedom, and nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, no one from either side is being forced to participate in the joint institute. In fact, just the opposite: one of he reasons it was created was to put a more formal structure around several existing collaborations that already existed between MSR and INRIA researchers to give them better support and make it easier for them to collaborate.
Microsoft Research is a very open, academic-style research lab. All of our researchers are encouraged to publish papers in conferences and journals -- we don't lock our researchers away. And MSR posts a lot of code, including source, for use by the larger research community; we just don't do it under the GPL. We often will use a FreeBSD-style license, following the philosophy that if you intend to give something away, you should just give it away with no strings attached.
So this announcement is a great thing for both groups and for the research community as a whole, and a real recognition of the incredible talent that the INRIA research centers have in France.
10:05:42 PM
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OK, I'm playing massive catch-up here, after two weeks of busy work and busy home life.
First up: on April 27th, Bill Gates, Rick Rashid (my boss), and several other VIPs were on a panel hosted by Microsoft Research in Washington, D.C. This was reported widely in the news because of one sound-bite from Bill regarding the H1-B visa cap and his desire to do away with it.
That description does not even beging to do justice to the fantastic discussion that took place with the panel. Here's the full transcript. I encourage you to read the whole thing -- it really brings home some of the issues that the United States is facing in trying to maintain its competitiveness going forward. And it brings to light some of the dumb, lazy mistakes we've made already that will cost us dearly.
One of the things that doesn't come out clearly is that the science and technology workforce pipeline is a long one. For the last two years in particular, undergraduate enrollments in science and technology, and particularly computer science, have dropped dramatically. We are not going to see the full impact of that for 4-5 years, and longer for the PhD pipeline. But it's a disaster that is waiting to happen. If we don't quickly reverse the trend, American science and technology based companies will have no choice but to hire foreign tech workers -- and if the H1-B visa caps remain in place, to offshore. Because there simply will not be any new tech workers here.
The panelists point out repeatedly that we have the best higher-education system in the world, but our K-12 system is in deep trouble and we need deeper investment (and that doesn't mean No Child Left Behind, aka "No Child Left Untested").
The panel also didn't spend enough time dissecting the claims on government R&D funding. There have been large R&D funding increases in the life sciences and in physical security. There have been small or no increases in the physical sciences, in computer science, and in cybersecurity. DARPA has also done two particularly harmful things: they are changing their practice so that they no longer will directly fund universty-based research, and they are classifying much of their funded research. Together, this cuts off the air supply to academic research, the real strength of the American university system. Industry can't compensate for this, because industry can't create the pipeline of talent to fuel our country's future growth and innovation.
I encourage you to take the time to read the whole transcript. It's well worth it.
9:53:15 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Kevin Schofield.
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