Briefs

Information Week, Nov 18, 2005.

Q&A with Bill Gates On Supercomputing, Software in Science, And More

... Gates: Some of the people like [Eric] Horvitz and [David] Heckerman who came to Microsoft Research came they're M.D.'s, and they're machine learning experts. There's a technique, a Bayesian [statistical] technique, in which Heckerman or Horvitz are two of the leading people. When those guys came, we were always interested in applying machine learning to see what drugs work, and what lifestyles work, things like that.

And they applied their things even to big data mining problems in business, where you say, 'OK, which are my most profitable customers, or what promotion techniques are working well?' They've taken some of their techniques against click streams to figure out how you should design the Web, or how searches work.

Search is an amazing example where we relied somewhat on an outside company, Inktomi, which Yahoo bought, then decided to build our own search effort essentially from scratch. Now, 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.

Here is the rest of the story.