Online Search Engine Google to Open New Research Facility in Pittsburgh
Internet search provider Google Inc. said it will open a research and development facility in Pittsburgh next year and has chosen a Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor to run it.
The facility will be charged with creating software search tools for Google. It is expected to create as many as 100 new high-tech jobs in the Pittsburgh area over the next few years, said Craig Nevill-Manning, director of Google’s New York engineering office.
Google is expected to put the facility on CMU’s campus in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, but did not specify when the office would open.
Craig said the southwestern Pennsylvania city was chosen because of "talent the Pittsburgh area has to offer."
The office will be headed by Andrew Moore, a Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and robotics who currently runs a research laboratory of 30 students, programmers and faculty members. Moore, 40, is an expert in data mining and artificial intelligence.
Andrew Moore has built his career on the twin challenges of developing techniques to extract patterns from large data sets and applying these machine learning methods to real-life problems, said Randal Bryant, the dean of Carnegie Mellon’s computer science school.
A graduate of the University of Cambridge in England, Moore joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty as an assistant professor of computer science and robotics in 1993.
Moore said the move is "astonishingly exciting–having Google opening an engineering office in Pittsburgh is like a dream come true."
The office will be one of several Google has opened near universities.
The company recently joined Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. in backing a $7.5 million Internet research laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. It also has facilities in New York, Phoenix, Santa Monica, Calif., and Mountain View, Calif., where the company is based.
Google has overseas offices in Japan; Switzerland and India.