Two Years With Yellow Fever: Computing in 21st Century

Today, we went to Grand Hotel in Taipei to attend the event, which could be called the conference or seminar. It was hold for the students of three universities -- National Taiwan University, Tsinghua University, and Chiao Tung University, roughly about one thousand people. The style of seminar was in fashion way, videos and slide show before the beginning with fast cuts, music, ... everything in order to attract the attention of young students :-)

Even though its name "Computing in 21st Century" (Challenge in the Quality Software), there were many more general thoughts and opinions then just some IT-focused stuff. No big surprise, there were several brilliant brains including three fellows with awarded with Turing Price -- Andrew Chi-Chic Yao, Jim Gray, and Niklaus Wirth. Again, something about the future, this time not just about the feelings though :-)

Senior Vice President of Microsoft Research, Rick Rashid showed few very interesting technologies on which are they working (or more likely, they were working). It looks they really know what they're doing and like to be always step ahead (of course, he didn't mention things like iPod, to name one ;-) ). His other words were concerning importance of their work for the whole society and the ways how it could influence our lives. And with this, we are actually getting somewhere. Do you remember the previous post about the current environmental issue? Is there is a link between these two? Rick Rashid in the last slide showed several topics where can be computing and similar fields handy, namely: