Bill Gates, chairman, co-founder and former head of Microsoft, has predicted that continual expansion of Internet services will provoke a revolution in software development.

During a visit to Hong Kong, Gates attended a forum on August 12 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Microsoft Research Asia, the company's regional research lab, which was founded in 1998 in Beijing, and has provided training for more than 2,000 interns from universities in the region.

This was Gate's first official speech in public after he stepped down as Microsoft Chief Executive in July 2008 to move to a full-time philanthropist role at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates told the 1,600 academics, IT representative and students that software breakthroughs would approach faster than they imagined.

He said one significant innovation will be the Natural User Interface (NUI) which had been underestimated. In the future it will "encompass all the new interaction techniques", such as touch and speech. He predicted extensive application of NUI in the robotics field, so that future robots can "drive cars, pick things up and understand visual scenes".

Read more @ Computer World