经典英语美文 （80）比尔·盖茨在清华大学的演讲(2)
Microsoft believes in doing a lot of research because the software of today is not adequate for tomorrow.It’s come a long way, such as the graphics interface, the application, and the way we deal with linguistics;it’s much better than it was a year ago. Building the Internet into the software has come a long way.Some of the more ambitious things, like teaching the computer to speak or listen or see,still require a lot of software work that’s not yet done, and so we’ve been investing in research,and building the number ofresearch locations which will be increasing in the years ahead.One advance is teaching the computer to pick up sentences and understand them,and not just think of them as a series of characters.
Here we have an example where the word processor is looking at an English sentence,and suggesting that thegrammar is not correct, and showing exactly how the grammer might be fixes.That kind of thing has proven to be extremely popular,and (it’s just a step on the road to getting computers to actually understand what’s going on) in the same way that humans do.That pursuit of artificial intelligence is the most exciting thing in computer science.Although the progress in that has been fairly slow, I’m confident that that will be accelerating quite a bit.
Another interesting area that I think people aren’t expecting is computer vision The actual digital cameras that allow you to have an image and scan that image are going down in cost;and software to recognize users, see what they’re looking at, what kind of gestures they’re making, that kind of software is coming along quite well. In fact I brought a short little film of a demonstration that someone from our vision group did,so let’s take a quick look at some of the progress that’s been made.
That just gives you a glimpse of one area that is expected to make the personal computer really disappear into the environment and connect up in a rich way. Tomorrow’s PC will be quite different from what we have today, tomorrow’s Internet will be much better than what we have today, but it will all evolve out of this technology that we have right now.
It’s clear that the reason we refer to this as the information age is that the capabilities available in the information age will let people reach out and get what they need, whether it’s business, learning, orfor entertainment. Microsoft feels in a very lucky position to be helping to drive these things, and key for us is working with other software companies so that they can build other applications on top of the system. Every industry needs a lot of software work there, and so I talk about the software industry creatingso many great jobs in the years ahead. I think you picked a great field to be in, and we look forward to working with you.
Thank you.
微软坚信还有大量的研究工作要做，因为今天的软件到明天就不够用了。我们在这方面的工作由来已久，例如图形界面、应用程序以及我们处理语言学的方式。与一年之前相比，我们已经取得了很大进步。我们在把因特网编制成软件方面也取得了长足进步。_些更加宏伟的计划，如教电脑说、听、看,仍然 需要做很多现在还没有做的软件工作。因此，我们一直在研究 开发软件、增加研究网点，在今后几年里,研究网点的数量还会继续堆加。我们已经取得的一个进展是教电脑识别和理解句子，而不仅仅是把它们看成一串串字符。
这里有一个例子，说的是文字处理程序看到一个英语句子，可以指出其语法错误，并准确地提出应该如何予以改正。像这类东西已经被证明极受人们欢迎，但是这仅仅是我们在使电脑像人那样真正知道发生了什么新的情况方面向前迈出了一小步。人工智能的探究是计算机科学中最为激动人心的部分。尽管这方面的进展还相当缓慢，但是我深信它会有很大进步的。
我猜想，另一个人们没料到的有趣领域是计算机视觉。能够用来照相和扫描的数码相机的价格正在下跌；而能够识别用户、注意用户正在看什么以及用户手势的这些软件的开发进展很快。亊实上,我带来了一小段演示影片，它是我们视觉小组的人员制作的，那么，让我们快速看一下我们研究的进展情况吧。
诸位看到的只是未来个人电脑发展的一个方面。未来的个人电脑将完全融入环境之中，并以各种方式互相联接起来。明天的个人电脑将和我们今天的大不相同，明天的因特网要比我 们今天的好得多，但是它们都将由我们现有的技术发展而来。
显然，我们之所以称今天的时代为信息时代,是因为在信息时代里,人们可以获取所需要的一切信息，无论是商业、学习还是娱乐信息。微软很幸运地处在这样的个位置，它将有助于促进这些亊物的发展。对我们来讲，关键在于和其他软件公司进行合作，使其能够在这个系统之上组建其他应用程序。每种产业都需要许多软件工作,所以我说，未来的软件产业将创造很 多巨大的就业机会。我认为你们选择了一个伟大的发展领域，而我们期待着与诸位的合作。
谢谢大家。