Rebecca Moore (scientist)

[3] 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.

)[6] 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.

[12][10] 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.

[18] 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.

[11][21][22] 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.

[29] 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.

[25][30] 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.

[32][33] 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.

[37][38] Moore founded the project that would become Google Earth Engine after she was approached by Carlos Souza Jr., a geoscientist from Imazon, on that first Brazil trip to aid the Suruí tribe in 2008.

Souza asked for a way to analyze satellite data to observe and prevent illegal logging which was costing the Amazon rainforest more than 1 million acres each year.

The project Moore's team built harnessed tens of thousands of computers to process and monitor Google Earth's satellite images and set off alarms about suspicious changes or activity.

[17][38][39] Google Earth Engine launched to the public in 2010, and is used by over a thousand scientists around the world for applications from forecasting drought and estimating agricultural crop yield, to predicting where chimpanzees are likely to build their nests.

For the release of Google Earth Engine in 2010, Moore, Hansen, and CONAFOR the Mexican government agency, processed 53,000 images in 15,000 computer hours to create the highest resolution forest and water map of Mexico ever.