Google Inc., the leading online search engine company, will open a new engineering and research office in Pittsburgh next year to be headed by a Carnegie Mellon University professor, the company said Thursday.
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.
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.
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.