Biography

Yoelle Maarek is the Chief Researcher for AI/IR at the UAE-based Technology Innovation Institute, (TII) working on developing new methods to improve the capabilities of TII’s family of Large Language Models, Falcon. She has been conducting research and development in information retrieval and Web search and data mining  for more than three decades. She has led the launch of multiple products and features impacting hundreds of millions of users, published more than 90 research articles and holds dozens of patents. 

Prior to TII, Yoelle has held executive roles at several tech giants: Vice President of Science and Research at Amazon, heading its Alexa Shopping Research organization worldwide, and serving in the company Science Leadership Team; Vice President of Research at Yahoo, guiding its research teams worldwide and launching numerous features in Yahoo Mail; Director of Engineering at Google, opening the company first engineering center in Israel, leading and launching Google Suggest, the query auto-completion service. Before Google, she was with IBM Research, first in the US, then in Israel, holding a number of positions from Research Staff Member to Distinguished Engineer.  She obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel in 1989, holds an engineering degree from the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, and a DEA (graduate degree) in Computer Science from Sorbonne university (formerly Paris VI), both awarded in 1985.

Yoelle has been serving in the most senior roles at top research conferences, such as SIGIR, WWW/TheWebConference and WSDM. She is a member of the Technion Board of Governors and was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2013. She was elected as an inaugural member of the SIGIR Academy and as a member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2021.

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