In technology and talent, Gates explores next generation

During his public presentation before 200 UW–Madison undergraduates, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates enlisted gung-ho alumni, eye-popping gadgetry and a video with hipster-dork character Napoleon Dynamite to make a point to his youthful audience: What could be cooler than a career in computers?

But in a private meeting earlier in his Oct. 12 visit, Gates fretted with a group of UW–Madison computer scientists and administrators about the challenge of falling enrollments nationwide in the computer sciences.

Gates was engaged in a discussion about the human resources challenge for his field — the primary impetus for a college tour that took him to five universities in four days. UW–Madison mirrors a national trend in declining enrollment, in which the number of computer science degrees are down from a peak of 190 in 2000 to about 140 in 2004.

Many factors have contributed to this trend, including post-Sept. 11 hurdles for international students and lingering perceptions of the dot-com bust. But the solution, based on successful projects at UW–Madison, may involve diversifying the pipeline.

Susan Horwitz, associate chair of computer science, described promising early results in a program called Wisconsin Emerging Scholars (WES). This program, initially funded by Microsoft and continued by the National Science Foundation, uses active recruiting to attract top students to computer careers, with a distinct emphasis on underrepresented groups.

As of fall 2004, Horwitz reported that 48 students are in the WES program, more than half of them women. The majority of women would not have enrolled without the recruiting. The retention of this group, through cooperative team learning, is dramatically higher than the norm, she says.

Amy Wendt, chair of the department of electrical and computer engineering, also shared successes with new programs aimed at underrepresented groups. The Graduate Engineering Research Scholars program, for example, produced its first Ph.D. cohort of eight graduates, and seven of them were minority women. In one year, that represented 20 percent of all doctorates in electrical engineering awarded nationally to minority women.

Wendt says a new freshman course this spring will build awareness of what a computer engineering degree is all about. The department also plans to introduce hands-on or “reconfigurable” computing workshops to students in grades four-12.

Gates is optimistic the trend will be turned around, given the resources that exist in American higher education. “I think it’s the jewel of the country, the fact that we have all of these great computer science departments here,” says Gates, who went casual for the Madison tour stop in a light green cotton sweater, black slacks and a pair of well-worn black loafers. “All of the top 10 programs in the world outside of Cambridge are in the United States. But that may not be true 10 years from now … because other countries can replicate what we do.”

UW–Madison was an appropriate stop for Gates because Microsoft is teeming with UW–Madison alumni, some of whom Gates knows by name, as Chancellor John Wiley discovered during their brief visit.

Contrasting with the declining student numbers is the amazing vibrancy of computer science research, which is now joined at the hip with most of the major scientific advances of our time. The discipline has emerged from what Gates described as “the handmaiden of the physical sciences” to one of its most essential players, as a driving force for major advances in genomics, bioinformatics, medicine and nanotechnology.

“What we hope to see is a computer science footprint in every discipline,” department chair Guri Sohi told Gates. “Computer science plays a transformational role for other disciplines and, in the process, transforms itself.”

Jude Shavlik, one of the faculty presenters, discussed machine learning projects at UW–Madison that are leading to a new form of “personalized medicine.” One project is collecting data from more than 20 years of patient records at the Marshfield Clinic, leading to a database that can identify treatment trends and responses to personalize medicine for new patients.

Dan van der Weide, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, described his work in nanotechnology, which involves mimicking human systems, such as the nervous system and brain-based algorithms, to create hardware that can interpret and influence the environment.

Computer science professor Miron Livny described his landmark project in distributed computing called “Condor,” a desktop network that scavenges computational power from thousands of idle computers to tackle high-end challenges for scientists. “We learned the value and the power of working together,” Livny says of colleagues in the sciences. “They need computer science and we need them.”

Computer science professor Mary Vernon described a long-term research pursuit in “near-optimal” computer design. The goal is to bring a kind of conceptual simplicity to computer design, making them easier to maintain, more efficient and increase performance compared to previous generations.

Vernon used the Internet as a classic example of the need for this design discipline: “The best first design is rarely the best long-term one. Now that we understand the Internet, we wish we could go back and redesign it to make it more effective.”