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VIEW THE VIDEO OF THE FORUM, WHICH WILL BEGIN AT 12:45
P.M. MAY 27

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May 16, 2003

Media Contact: Pat JaCoby, (858) 534-7404

BILL GATES TO SPEAK AT UCSD STUDENT FORUM MAY 27

Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corp., will discuss the future of computing technology during a meeting with University of California, San Diego students at 12:45 p.m. May 27 in the Price Center Ballroom. The meeting is free and open to the public.

Gates will give brief remarks on “The Magic of Software in the Digital Decade” and then hold an informal conversation with UCSD Chancellor Robert C. Dynes and Larry Smarr, the Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering and founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)²]. A question and answer session will follow.

In his remarks Gates will describe how, by the end of this decade—a time he calls the Digital Decade—computing technology will become so inexpensive, powerful and ubiquitous that it will be seamlessly woven into the fabric of our society. Gates also will describe the ongoing role of research as it drives innovation in academia and industry.

In addition to his involvement with computers and software, Gates is interested in biotechnology. He sits on the board of ICOS, a company that specializes in protein-based and small-molecule therapeutics, and he is an investor in a number of other biotechnology companies.

Dynes, a physicist and an expert on semiconductors and superconductors, is active in the national scientific arena and chairs the National Research Council’s Board of Physics and Astronomy. He sits on the University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory.

As director of Cal-(IT)², Smarr brings together more than 200 UCSD and UC Irvine faculty with over 50 industrial partners to research the future development of the Internet. Prior to joining UCSD in 2000, Smarr served as founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois and in 1997 became director of the National Computational Science Alliance, comprised of over 50 universities, government labs and corporations linked with NCSA in a national-scale virtual enterprise to prototype the information infrastructure of the 21st century.