“The best workforce during my lifetime will be in the United States,” assured Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder and chief software architect, in response to a question about outsourcing software development jobs to locations in India and China.

Last Wednesday, Gates made Carnegie Mellon his second stop on a five campus tour that includes Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and the University of Illinois. He’s lecturing on “Software Breakthroughs: Solving the Toughest Problems in Computer Science.” Tickets to the event were selectively distributed to students.

Job market conditions were a very pertinent topic for a standing-room only crowd of computer science and engineering students that filled McConomy Auditorium this past Wednesday morning.

Gates’s reassurance was conditional.

“There’s a new dimension coming with global competition,” he said. “It will be an interesting challenge in terms of the United States renewing its edge.”

He compared the current situation to the fear of Japanese superiority in the 1980s. Gates argued that humility and commitment to research and problem solving in America will continue to attract and retain the best talent, and that “there’s going to be a need both at the university level and at the commercial level to up the ante in terms of the research that gets done.”

Gates commended Carnegie Mellon for its strong commitment to technology research, specifically mentioning speech recognition and machine translation projects. Microsoft benefits from Carnegie Mellon’s diverse technical talent. Rick Rashid, current head of Microsoft Research, was a long-time SCS faculty member. The company is the largest employer of computer science graduates, last year hiring 25 graduates and twenty-five interns. Microsoft also funds MSImpact, a student organization focused on using Microsoft technology.

Microsoft has a large commitment to long-term software research, with this year’s research budget at $6.8 billion.

“We’re either crazy or a lot of software breakthroughs are coming out of that,” Gates quipped.

Gates demonstrated a few Microsoft Research prototypes, including MediaFrame, a piece of software that provides a powerful interface to a collection of pictures and movies. The application can sort and group media by not only keywords, but also by visual characteristics such as whether or not a photo contains a face.

Gates also discussed current problems facing computer software such as spam, security exploits, and inefficiency. He believes that software developers need to catch up with the rapid increase in processor speed and storage space in order to make computing more secure and more efficient for knowledge workers.

Following the lecture, Gates opened the floor to questions from students. Physics junior Ed Ryan offered Gates the gift of a Linux CD. Not missing a beat, Gates accepted and joked, “How much is it worth?” Microsoft views open-source Linux as a challenge to its core business of Windows-based operating systems and servers.

Other students posed more serious questions. What advance in technology surprised him the most? He admits it was the exponential growth of the Internet. Looking back, what would he change? Since his company has seen so much success, he said there wasn't much other than that he wishes Microsoft would have gotten more serious about security a few years earlier.

Despite his obvious bias as the founder of the world’s largest software company, Gates truly believes that computer technology and biotechnology are “the two things that can improve the world.” His company and foundation have donated millions of dollars to diverse causes ranging from education to public health in third world countries. And his challenge for all to consider is, “How can I give back as much as possible?”

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