This week Microsoft Research’s External Research and Programs group is holding its annual Faculty Summit at the Microsoft Conference Center on the Redmond campus. More than 350 academic leaders representing 175 institutions are in attendance.

The 2006 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit is intended to pick up where last year’s summit left off, by addressing the growing crisis in computer science education and its talent pipeline in the United States.

During today’s opening plenary session, an influential panel from academia, industry, women in computing, and government shared their understanding of this “gathering storm,” as the problem has been dubbed in a recent National Academy of Sciences paper. The plenary session will initiate a two-day dialogue about what is needed to ensure that a new generation of computing professionals will emerge to move the discipline forward.

Hosted by Richard Newton, dean of the College of Engineering and the Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, the panel included Dan Mote, president of the University of Maryland; Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief technical officer of advanced strategies and policy; Lucy Sanders, CEO and co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology; and Richard Russell, associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy for the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

To get a better understanding of the issues being discussed this week, and the importance of bringing industry, academia and government together to solve them, PressPass sat down with some members of the plenary session panel, along with Sailesh Chutani, director and founder of the External Research and Programs group.