19 November 1998

Andrew Moore is First Recipient of the Habermann Chair in Computer Science

Andrew Moore, Assistant Professor of Robotics and Computer science, is the first recipient of the newly established A. Nico Habermann Chair in the School of Computer Science (SCS).

The chair, which is awarded for three-year periods, was created to enhance the careers of promising junior faculty members. It honors Dr. A. Nico Habermann, the founding dean of SCS, who also headed the Computer Science Department from which it was formed from 1968-1991. Dr. Habermann passed away in 1993.

"Nico believed in fostering the talents of younger faculty and served as a mentor to many," said Jim Morris, Head of the Computer Science Department. "Andrew is an excellent professor. He is brilliant, friendly, informal, and a great and entertaining lecturer."

"Andrew is a young star in the research area of automated learning with his innovative ideas and practical applications," added Robotics Institute Director Takeo Kanade. "His interdisciplinary research style creates synergy among units in SCS and other colleges of Carnegie Mellon."

Moore, 33, has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon faculty for the past five years. During that time, he has established himself as an expert in using robotics and datamining to solve manufacturing problems. As a machine learning researcher, he has become one of the leaders in the area of memory-based learning methods and has applied these methods to problems such as modeling manufacturing processes.

"Andrew envisions a future in which companies will become dramatically more productive by mining data on all aspects of their operations," says Tom Mitchell, SCS Professor and Director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD). "He has long been a major proponent of collaborative research with industry. In fact, the software produced by his own research is now used routinely by several companies to improve the productivity of their manufacturing operations."

Moore's membership in CALD has also pushed him in vastly different directions. He is one of five researchers who recently received a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop algorithms that would lead to automated scientific discovery, for instance, from the large data sets coming out of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a major project in astrophysics.

A native of England, Moore grew up in Bournemouth on the country's south coast. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from Cambridge University in 1986. He spent a year at Hewlett-Packard's research laboratory in Bristol before returning to Cambridge in 1987 for a doctor's degree in computer science. In 1990, he became a post doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1993.

Moore and a co-researcher in robotics recently started their own company -- Schenley Park Research -- a spinoff of their work at the Institute. The firm focuses on problems in scheduling and data mining.

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