Rebecca Moore (scientist)

Rebecca Moore (born 1955) is an American software engineer, director of Google Earth, and director and founder of the Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine computer mapping projects.

Moore grew up in Roslyn, New York, with one sister and two brothers.

Her father, Earle K. Moore, was a communications and civil rights lawyer in Manhattan, who won a landmark case establishing that broadcast stations must serve the interests of their viewers.

Her brother, Frank C. Moore, was an artist and activist, including being an originator of the Red Ribbon project for AIDS solidarity.

The tribe only had its first contact with outsiders in 1969, but in the years since had seen their land destroyed by mining and logging.

The tribe's chief, Almir Narayamoga Surui, the first person of his tribe to go to college, discovered Google Earth in an Internet café, and thought it could be used to help.

(Rebecca Moore completed his work setting up the Gesso Foundation for artists after his death.) She attended Roslyn High School, graduated Brown University with a bachelor's degree with honors in Artificial Intelligence in 1977, then worked as a software engineer for companies including Hewlett-Packard and General Instrument.

Moore was then living in Los Gatos, California, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a rural area that was poorly served by government agencies; an ambulance took 2 hours to reach a neighbor's house, partly because they were using a hand-drawn map from 1983.

So Moore founded a civic association, the Mountain Resource Group, and began work on digital maps of the area.

They were used by first responders, civil agencies, and her neighbors.

She used consumer software, then professional geographic information systems software, before settling on Keyhole, Inc's Earth Viewer.

When her father died in 2001, then her brother Frank in early 2002, Moore felt a duty to accomplish something in her life, as they had.

She returned to academia to study bioinformatics, to treat disease with the help of computer analysis, earning a master's degree in cognitive psychology from Stanford University, but left after three years before completing her PhD in computer science.

Google had recently acquired Keyhole, Inc (in October 2004), and offered her a job on the project, which would become Google Earth.

Google gives its employees 20% time, the ability to use a fifth of their hours to work on side projects, and Moore used hers to work on what would become Google Earth Outreach, acting as a link between the mapping software and the environmental community.

Brian McClendon, a co-founder of Keyhole, Inc. then a VP leading Google Earth, was a strong supporter of the idea from the beginning, and made sure Google provided the funds.

Moore was an active user of Keyhole's Earth Viewer software, enough so that in 2005 she was invited by the company to give a tech talk on using the product.

She gave a list of eight to ten specific suggestions to improve the tool.

In August 2005, the San Jose Water Company (SJWC) submitted a proposal to log a 1000-acre swathe of redwood trees in the Los Gatos Mountains, and sent copies to Moore and her neighbors.

Moore started a subgroup of her civic association, Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, to oppose the project, and used the Google Earth application to create a detailed map, including a 3-D "flyover" movie, displaying the area that would be logged in relationship to the mountains and the local watershed.

It demonstrated that logging trucks would be taking winding roads used by children to walk to school, and that helicopters would be carrying large tree trunks over homes, schools, and playgrounds.

It was referenced in local and national newspapers, shown on local television news, to Ira Ruskin, the district representative in the California State Legislature, and to former vice president Al Gore, who issued a statement opposing the proposed logging.

The debate went on for years; in 2006, Moore got Kenneth Adelman of the California Coastal Records Project to fly her in a helicopter over the SJWC land to take photographs to prove the water company owned more timberland than would qualify it for the open-ended logging permit that it was applying for.

The first Google geoblog, a Web log with the entries referenced by geographical locations in Google Earth, was a joint project with the Jane Goodall Institute in 2006.

It covered the daily lives of the chimpanzees of the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, and the field researchers who studied them.

The Google Earth imagery was used to draw attention to the loss of chimpanzee habitat, and to map the location of chimpanzee poaching snares.

Moore was a fan of Jane Goodall's work, and personally cold called JGI to propose the cooperation.

After a September 2007 California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection hearing, the proposal was defeated.

Equally important, the publicity Moore's work had gathered by using Google Earth to save a redwood forest led to contacts by many nonprofits interested in working with Google Earth Outreach.

Within a week of the launch of their project using Google Earth in 2007, their online petition got 12,000 signatures.

Yet another 2007 project was a collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about the crisis in Darfur, controversially naming it a genocide, and showing satellite pictures of razed villages and refugee camps and personal photographs and stories of people who lost families and homes.

In 2007, the Amazon Conservation Team flew him to the United States, where he met with Moore in her Mountain View office at Google Earth Outreach.

In 2008, Moore and four other Google employees flew to the Amazon to teach the Suruí, many of whom had never used a computer, to use Google's tools to make maps, blogs, photos, and YouTube videos to document the loss of their land; in exchange, the Suruí painted the Googlers' skin with Jenipapo berries and made them honorary members of the tribe.

The Suruí blogs drew international attention.

In 2009, the Googlers returned with Android phones equipped with GPS, that the tribe could use to photograph illegal logging to present as evidence to law enforcement, and inventory trees and calculate carbon content to apply for forest carbon offsets.

By 2013, the HALO Trust was using Google Earth to help clear landmines, by mapping cleared and yet uncleared areas; a Google Earth Outreach grant funded an online minefield tour narrated by Angelina Jolie.

Moore was among the first to support the Paiter Suruí people, an indigenous tribe of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, by teaching them to use Google's maps to preserve their culture and their land.

Googlers returned to Gombe in 2014 with Google Street View cameras, to map the forest from the viewpoint of a person walking its trails.

Goodall herself thanked Moore in her book Seeds of Hope, for her help and her personal friendship.

Another early Google Earth Outreach project was with Appalachian Voices, which used the tools to illustrate the effects of mountaintop removal mining, with before and after pictures of 470 mountains that have been razed for coal.