MS research can teach scientists

MS research can teach scientists

Q&A: Bill Gates On Supercomputing, Software In Science, And More Aaron Ricadela Nov 18 2005

Ricadela .. How can Microsoft Research technology or the intellect of those people be applied to these broad problems in science, medicine, or engineering?

Gates: .. There's a technique, a Bayesian statistical technique, in which Heckerman or Horvitz are two of the leading people ..

Bayesian filter as used in email spam filtering ..

P(ws) P (s) P(sw) = --------------- P(w)

Where w = words and s = spam and p is the probability. Bayesian named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes who invented the method in 1763. Of course MS research were working on a similar method in 1759 :)

.. in a very short period of time, we will actually have more than matched the kind of relevance that Google can deliver. The role of Microsoft Research in that has been phenomenal.

Where's the innovation in merely cloning Google

Gates: .. all these genetic algorithms, like we're using for the AIDS vaccine project, we invented those, those are software techniques ..

Gates: .. Nathan Myhrvold, who founded our research group, was more of a physicist, but he's a brilliant software person. Now he's like a patent lawyer. But he's multifaceted.

Gates: .. it's been a Holy Grail of computer science to say, "Can you make one machine with power N, take the software, run it on N machines with power 1 and do the same thing?"

The answer is, in general, no you can't, but can you for an interesting clbutt of problems? There are the ones that are called embarrbuttingly parallel ... and we've got a lot of the brilliant people who have thought about this for a long time working for us.

Gates: .. Microsoft search, the search cluster, uses what we call our Dynamic Systems Initiative, software that's designed that way to manage thousands of machines. We have less than one operator per thousand servers on our search cluster ...