Looks like a good choice, covering quite a few strengths. Unlike many "external" hires plucked from industry to lead university divisions (which doesn't always work out well), Moore is as much of a CMUer as a Googler: He was professor in the school he'll now be dean of from 1993 to 2006, and has maintained strong ties since, so is quite familiar with its culture and operation.
And from 2006 to present he worked (practically) next door to CMU at Google's Pittsburgh office, which was set up specifically to make and maintain close ties with the school.
They recently moved their office to Bakery Square, probably due to space constraints in the CIC. It's not exactly far away, but no longer right next door.
Seems like a good move. It sends a signal that it's ok for faculty to work in industry. Probably a net benefit to the school, but perhaps may have some unintended consequences of faculty leaving too.
Doesn't CMU also have a campus or program in Silicon Valley?
I remember taking Moore's grad level Machine Learning course in 2005 (was co-taught with Tom Mitchell). I have great memories from that course, especially interactions with my fellow robotics friends: Mark Palatucci (now a co-founder and officer at Anki), Geoffrey Hollinger (now a professor at Oregon State), and Jon Huang (now a postdoc at Stanford).
Moore gave us a very intuitive way to understand machine learning algorithms, and Mitchell gave us a more theoretical account. I remember working with Jon Huang on a Latent Dirichelet Allocation algorithm implementation for the final project. It was a lot of fun and very intense at the same time. Such great memories!
Moore have me an excellent foundation of concepts, and I'm really glad for CMU to have such a respectable figure back on campus.
I expect great things for CMU, especially Robotics and Machine Learning!
Any time I come across that makes me respect CMU more, I'm uncomfortably reminded of their continued association with the SEI and CMMI. Yes it came out of CMU, yes it's a cash cow, yes things like healthcare.gov show how CMMI compliance are crucial to creating quality software. Okay yeah the last thing not so much.
Seriously, it's marketing snake oil and its creating wasteful barriers to entry for companies thinking of creating innovative user-friendly government software. And it can't die fast enough. I know its probably not high on this dean's priority list, but if I were a CMU student I'd be embarrassed that my university was associated a pseudo-serious institution that makes claims vastly exceeding what the scientific method can conclude given the data they present. The gap between their projected air of authority and their obliviousness to the limits of their methodology should make any engineer-oriented person uneasy. Yes there are probably some smart people in the SEI with interesting war stories and such but the whole certification thing has got to go.
Most of you in start-ups probably never heard of CMMI. This is generally a good thing.
I work in the CERT division at the SEI. I have no idea what CMMI stands for, and I'm not even sure what it actually is [1]. If I hadn't heard it mentioned in passing once or twice over the last year, I would be even more clueless.
What I would like my perspective to convey, is that the SEI is a relatively large institution. I am aware there is some methodology-type work being done, but I've never met anyone who is engaged with it.
For what it's worth, I think the SEI handles some interesting R&D. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but in my experience it compares favorably to the startup world in terms of dynamism and engineering challenges.
[1] So, I did end up googling it, and it turns out CMMI was handed off to a dedicated institute and is no longer managed or developed by the SEI.
I took ai from Dr Moore as an undergrad; he's an excellent teacher. These sorts of close ties between industry and academia are a great thing in a world where <10% of grad students become professors; I would love to see more of this in the biomedical fields.
Anybody else think the header on this page is too big? If you scroll to the bottom and take the footer into account the content is almost restricted to 1/3 of the window.
Yeah, it's the browser toolbar 2.0. I have a bookmarklet to delete page elements and half the time I use it on these. The other half is on blog posts that have a huge picture of the author right along side. I can't read with someone staring at me.
Fixed headers/footers make it impossible to navigate content using the keyboard. Pressing spacebar/page down doesn't take into account the missing real estate and you miss a few lines of content every time.
I really dislike page that uses fixed position header like that. It wastes a lot of spaces. If they want to go back quickly, add a pretty "back to top" on the side...
