Microsoft has the transcript of remarks Bill Gates made this week at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2005. They cover a lot of ground, but there are some refrains he hits that will resonate with those of us who support federal funding for computer science research. Here’s his reply when he was asked whether the government should be spending money on computer science research in tough economic times:
BILL GATES: Well, I think the payoff, if there's any place you can say there's been a dramatic payoff, it's in computer science. The United States in the 1980s was viewed as falling behind, Japan had a better industrial model, the U.S. just was going to lose industry after industry; and yet what really happened in the 1990s was that our economy created more jobs, new companies, lots of amazing leadership things happened. And I think you can really point to the DOD and NSF money that went into computer science work as being one of the key elements that allowed us to turn what was a period where people thought we were falling behind into preparation for one of the greatest success periods the country has ever had.
The amount of money we're talking about here is not gigantic, I mean, compared to, say, the government budget as a whole or the defense budget or even research as a whole, the portion that computer science really should get is not that gigantic, but to have a decline is really bad.
And part of the reason it's hard for people to see the decline I think is that there was all that DOD related money, DARPA primarily, but I remember when I was a computer science student, all the reports would have things like, "thanks to the Office of Naval Research" and I always wondered what the heck was the Office of Naval Research doing on speech recognition or linguistics, but, what the heck, it was good money.
And we've been able to draw on all these different sources, so as some of those have become shorter term or more focused, the numeric impact on are we really tackling these frontiers has been more dramatic than I think people realize.
And it's kind of a crime that at the time when computer science is about to solve the most interesting problems, and when computer science is not only an interesting field of its own with some exciting problems, but it's also becoming the toolkit for all the sciences where biologists are turning to us and saying, OK, how do you find the pattern in this information or astronomers or physicists or basically all the sciences are becoming very data driven, you'd think, wow, there would be a shift of NIH money into computer science techniques and standards and things like that. That's also not happening to any significant degree.
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