CV

Chief Research of AI/IR for the Technology Innovation Institute. Formerly, VP of Research for Alexa Shopping at Amazon, VP and head of Research at Yahoo, Director of Engineering at Google, Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research. Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, inaugural member of the ACM SIGIR Academy, ACM Fellow, member of the Technion Management Council and of the Technion Board of Governors. Member of The Web conference series steering committee. Technion PhD graduate in Computer Science. Holding a  Sorbonne University graduate degree and an engineering degree from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris, France. More than thirty years of experience in research and development, first in information retrieval, then in search and data mining. Demonstrated record of professional achievements, and research activities.

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) | Haifa Israel
2024 - todate | Chief Researcher

• Leading AI/IR organization for TII in Israel.  The AI/IR focuses on advancing the state of the art in AI and Information Retrieval to improve TII’s series of Falcon Large Language Models.

Alexa Shopping, Amazon | Haifa, Israel
2017 - 2023 | VP of Research

• Established the worldwide (US, UK, Israel) applied science organization of Alexa Shopping. Alexa Shopping focuses on enabling new customers’ shopping experiences and addressing existing customers’ pain points when interacting with Alexa, Amazon voice-based digital assistant. The applied science organization I built from scratch drove the science behind numerous  new shopping-experiences for Alexa customers, and validated the novelty of their work by publishing at conferences such as WSDM, TheWebConf, SIGIR, ACL, ICML, etc.
• Cofounder and member of the Amazon Science Leadership team. Helped establish the cross-org Amazon Science Leadership team responsible for defining shared mechanisms for all scientists across all of Amazon (e.g. the scientific publication approval, the scientist job definitions, the Amazon Science external website, etc.)

Yahoo Inc. | Haifa, Israel
2014-2017 | VP of Research, head of Yahoo Research worldwide (2016-2017), of Yahoo Labs EMEA (2015-2016) of Yahoo Labs Israel & India (2014)
2009-2013 | Senior Research Director, head of Yahoo Labs Israel (2013), head of Yahoo Research Israel (2009-2012)

• As a manager, I was first tasked with building from scratch a new research team, which would live side by side with the existing Applied Sciences team in Haifa. As of 2013, I was appointed head of Yahoo Labs Israel and overall lead of the Haifa site. In early 2016, we decided to adopt a new hybrid model of research at Yahoo, which combined independent and integrated research. I then became the head of Yahoo Research worldwide, and served as chair of the Yahoo Research Council. I directly managed research teams in Haifa and NY. Our researchers contributed to key products of the company in Ads, Mail and Search.
• As a research lead, I provided strategic guidance to my teams, ensuring they investigate research directions that are relevant and meaningful to Yahoo, publishing at top conferences and contributing to the Academic community. We published dozens of research papers and earned several best paper/runner ups awards at KDD’2009, ODA’2011, RecSys’2011, KDD’2013, ICWSM’2015, SIGIR’2016. In addition, I personally contributed to the research community by giving tutorials and regularly serving as Senior PC member or PC chair at conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM and WWW.

Google Inc. | Haifa, Israel
2006-2009 | Director of Engineering

• I joined Google in 2006 as its first engineer in Israel and was tasked with opening the Haifa Engineering Center. I established a strategy for the center and developed a core competency around Search Quality, YouTube and Gmail. Our most impactful was the launch of Google Suggest (also known as “query auto completion”) on google.com in 2008, and subsequently on all international Google search and YouTube homepages. Another visible launch initiated by my team was YouTube “Video Annotations, and the email recipient completion feature in Gmail.

IBM Haifa Research Lab | Haifa, Israel
2005-2006 | Department Group Manager and Distinguished Engineer
1993-2003 | Senior Manager (2001-2005), Manager (1997-2001), Research Staff Member (1993-1997)

• On the technical side, I introduced in the Lab the field of search. I led the  first Web application project to the Lab, devising with colleagues a new Web crawling and site mapping software to visualize and manage web sites. I headed the research and development of the first IBM Web search engine, which led to several research publications, and won the “ad-hoc track” of the TREC conference in 2001. I was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2001, and appointed Distinguished Engineer in 2006.
• On the management side, my responsibility consisted in securing internal funding to support and grow the group. In 2002, I took over the additional role, beyond the Haifa site, to co-lead the “Unstructured Information Management” sub-strategy for the IBM Research Division. In 2004, I was appointed a member of the Lab management team. I led teams conducting applied research in multiple information related areas, from search and collaboration to voice and multimedia technologies. 

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center | Hawthorne, New York, USA 1989-1993
1989-1993 | Research Staff Member (1990-1992) Post Doc (1989-1990)

• I joined the software environment group as a post-doc, upon graduating in 1989, and investigated the applicability of information retrieval technologies to indexing comments in software development environments.  Upon completion of my post-doc, I was offered a conversion to a research staff position, which allowed me to extend my research agenda. I decided then to depart from the field of software and fully focus on information retrieval. I built in C/Unix, Guru, the first IBM Research information retrieval engine, which leveraged the novel indexing mechanism I had devised during my PhD studies. Guru led to several research publications at top venues (SIGIR’89, TSE) and was the ancestor of Juru that my team later developed at IBM Haifa.

Technion, Israel Institute of Technology | Haifa, Israel
1985-1989 | PhD in Computer Science

• My PhD research focused on the application of information retrieval technologies to the construction of software reuse libraries. The key contribution of my thesis was the invention of a novel multiple-word indexing unit (lexical affinities) that allowed disambiguating words by context and achieved higher precision than traditional single-word models that were the standard at the time. My advisor was Prof. Daniel M. Berry, yet I tightly collaborated with Prof. Gail Kaiser, who hosted me at Columbia University CS Department, in 1986-87 and introduced me to the field of information retrieval.

Sorbonne University (formerly Paris VI) | Paris France
1984-1985 | D.E.A (Graduate Degree) in Computer Science/AI

• In parallel to my engineering degree, I was admitted into a selective Graduate Program at Paris VI University in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. I graduated with honors (“Mention Bien”).

Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees (ENPC) | Paris, France
1982-1985 | Ingenieur Civil des Ponts et Chaussees (Engineering Degree) – Major Applied Math and CS

• After two years of “Math Sup” and “Math Spe” classes, I passed the competitive exam to the “Concours Commun” for admission in one of the top French Engineering Schools. I was ranked among the top 1% candidates and admitted to the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees. I selected a double major, Applied Math and Computer Science. I graduated with honors.

• 2023-date: Member of the steering committee of the ACM Web Conference (formerly WWW)
• 2021: Elected to the US National Academy of Engineering
• 2021: Elected as an inaugural member to the SIGIR Academy
• 2019: Selected by Lady Globes among the 50 most influential women in Israel
• 2018: Selected by Lady Globes among the 50 most influential women in Israel
• 2017-2023: Member of the steering committee of the WSDM conference series
• 2016-to date: Chair of the “Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Award for Women in Mathematical and Computing Sciences for Israel” selection committee.
• 2016: Selected by Lady Globes among the 50 most influential women in Israel. Corporate Yahoo Excellence Award for Outstanding Performance
• 2015-2023: Member of IW3C2, the International World Wide Web Conferences Committee that organizes the Web Conference series (formerly known as WWW).
• 2015: Corporate Yahoo Excellence Award for performance.
• 2014-to date: Elected as a member of the Technion Management Council.
• 2014: Chosen by Business Insider as one of the 22 most powerful women engineers in the world, by the Israeli Haaretz newspaper as one of the “66 Israeli women you should know”. Corporate Yahoo Excellence Award for Outstanding Performance
• 2013-to date: ACM Fellow. Elected as chair of Student Affairs Committee at Technion Board of Governors.
• 2013-2016: Elected Vice-Chair of ACM SIGIR
• 2013: Selected by Lady Globes among the 50 most influential women in Israel.
• 2012: Yahoo “Super-Star Team Award” for a novel mail-based ad product for Mail Retargeting that drove significant new revenues to Yahoo.
• 2010-2013: ACM Distinguished Scientist.
• 2009: Selected by Lady Globes among the 50 most influential women in Israel
• 2008-to date: Elected as member of the Technion Board of Governors.
• 2005: Elected to the Technology Council of the IBM Academy of Technology.
• 2003: IBM Outstanding Innovation award for “Juru, a Java search engine”.
• 2001: Elected to the IBM Academy of Technology
• 1998: IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for “Mapuccino”, a Web site mapping system

• Filed more than 25 patents, 12 of which having been issued already. Was awarded the “Master Inventor” level at IBM Research in 2000, and at Yahoo in 2012.

• 2026: General Chair, TheWebConf'2026 to be held in Dubai, UAE
• 2024: Senior PC member (SPC) at WSDM'204
• 2023: Steering committee liaison for the WebConf'2023, SPC at SIGIR'2023, the WebConf2023, CIKM'2023
• 2022: SPC at WSDM'2022, TheWebConf'2022, SIGIR'2022
• 2021: Steering committee liaison for WSDM’2021, Vice-Chair for the Search track at TheWebConf'2021, SPC at SIGIR'2021, CIKM'2021
• 2020: SPC at WSDM’2020, TheWebConf’2020, SIGIR’2020
• 2019: Vice-Chair for Search track of the Web Conference 2019, PC chair of SIGIR’2019, SPC of WSDM’2019. Invited talk at SIRIP'2019 (SIGIR Industry track)
• 2018: PC chair of WSDM’2018, SPC at CIKM’2018, KDD’2018, CHIIR’2018. Invited keynote at CIKM'2018.
• 2017: SPC at WSDM’2017, KDD’2017 and SIGIR’2017, co-chair of WSDM’2017 Doctoral Consortium. Invited keynote at WWW’2017 and SIGIR’2017.
• 2016: SPC at WSDM’2016, KDD’2016, IJCAI’2016
• 2015: SPC at WWW’2015, CIKM’2105, Workshops co-chair at WSDM’2015, Tutorials chair at SIGIR’2015
• 2014: SPC at WWW 2014, SIGIR2014
• 2013: SPC at SIGIR’2013 and WWW’2013.
• 2012: PC Chair at WSDM’2012 and SIGIR’2012. Co-organized tutorial at SIGIR’2012 Usage Data in Web Search”
• 2011: SPC at WSDM’2011 and SIGIR’2011. Co-organized tutorial at WSDM’2011, WWW’2011 and SIGIR’2011 on “Web Retrieval: The Role of Users” (second edition).
• 2010: SPC at SIGIR’2010, Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Information Processing and Management.
• 2009: PC Chair of WWW’2009

• Alexa, Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” Characterizing Playful Requests to Conversational Agents, Chen Shani, Alexander Libov, Sofia Tolmach, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek and Dafna Shahaf. CHI EA'22, April 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA.
• Why Do People Buy Seemingly Irrelevant Items in Voice Product Search? David Carmel, Elad Haramaty, Arnon Lazerson, Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek. WSDM’2020, Houston, TX, Jan 2020.
• Alexa, Can You Help me Shop? Yoelle Maarek. Invited talk in Industry Track.  SIGIR'2019, July 2019, Paris, France.
• Alexa and her Shopping Journey, Yoelle Maarek. Keynote Address. CIKM’2018, Turin, Italy, October 2018.
• Leveraging Crowdsourcing Data for Deep Active Learning. An Application: Learning Intents in Alexa. Jie Yang, Thomas Drake, Andreas Damianou and Yoelle Maarek. The Web Conference (formerly WWW) 2018, Lyon, France, April 2018.
• Mail Search: It’s Getting Personal. Yoelle Maarek. Keynote Address. SIGIR'2017, Tokyo, Japan, August 2017.
• Mailbox-Based vs. Log-Based Query Completion for Mail Search. Michal Horovitz, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Alexander Libov, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Raviv. SIGIR'2017, (short paper), Tokyo, Japan, August 2017.
• Web Mail is Not Dead: It’s Just Not Human Anymore! Keynote address, Yoelle Maarek. WWW'2017, Perth, Australia, April 2017.
• Promoting Relevant Results in Time-Ranked Mail Search, David Carmel, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Alex Libov, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Raviv. WWW 2017, Perth, Australia, April 2017.
• The Demographics of Mail Search and their Application to Query Suggestion. David Carmel, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Alex Libov, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Raviv. WWW 2017, Perth, Australia, April 2017.
• Structural Clustering of Machine-Generated Mail, Noa Avigdor-Elgrabli, Mark Cwalinski, Dotan Di Castro, Iftah Gamzu, Irena Grabovitch-Zuyev, Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek. CIKM'2016, Indianapolis, IN, Oct 2016.
• One Query, Many Clicks: Analysis of Queries with Multiple Clicks by the Same User, Elad Kravi, Ido Guy, Avihai Mejer, David Carmel, Yoelle Maarek, Dan Pelleg and Gilad Tsur. CIKM'2016, Indianapolis, IN, Oct 2016.                 
• Enforcing k-anonymity in Web mail auditing, Dotan Di Castro, Liane Lewin Eytan, Yoelle Maarek, Ran Wolff and Eyal Zohar. WSDM'2016, San Francisco, CA, Feb 2016. 
• You’ve got mail, and here is what you could do with it! Analyzing and predicting actions on email messages, Dotan Di Castro, Liane Lewin Eytan, Yoelle Maarek and Zohar Karnin. WSDM'2016, San Francisco, CA, Feb 2016. 
• Rank by time of by relevance? Revisiting Email Search. David Carmel, Guy Halawi, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek and Ariel Raviv. CIKM’2015, Melbourne Australia, Oct 2015.
• You Will Get Mail! Predicting the Arrival of Future Email. Iftah Gamzu, Zohar Shay Karnin, Yoelle Maarek,David Wajc. TempWeb 2105, WWW’2015 Companion volume, Florence Italy, May 2015.
• How Many Folders Do You Really Need? Classifying Email into a Handful of Categories. Mihajlo Grbovic, Guy Halawi, Zohar Shay Karnin, Yoelle Maarek. CIKM’2014, Shanghai China, Nov 2014
• Will my Question be Answered? Predicting “Question Answerability” in Community Question-Answering Sites. Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek and Idan Szpektor. ECML/PKDD 2013, Prague, Sept 2013.
• From Query to Question in One Click: Suggesting Synthetic Questions to Searchers. Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek, Avihai Mejer and Idan Szpektor. WWW'2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. May 2013.
• When Relevance is not Enough: Promoting Diversity and Freshness in Personalized Question Recommendation, Idan Szpektor, Yoelle Maarek and Dan Pelleg. WWW'2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. May 2013.
• Threading Machine Generated Email. Nir Ailon, Zohar S. Karnin, Edo Liberty and Yoelle Maarek. WSDM'2013, Rome, Italy, Feb 2013.
• Can you believe an anonymous contributor? On truthfulness in Yahoo! Answers. Dan Pelleg, Elad Yom-Tov and Yoelle Maarek. SocialCom'2012, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sep 2012.
• When Web Search Fails, Searchers Become Askers: Understanding the Transition. Qiaoling Liu, Eugene Agichtein,Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek and Idan Szpektor. SIGIR'2012, Portland, OR.
• Learning from the past: answering new questions with past answers. Anna Shtok, Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek and  Idan Szpektor. WWW'2012, Lyon, France, April 2012
• The new frontier of Web Search Technology: Seven challenges. R. Baeza-Yates, A. Broder and Y. Maarek. In Search and Computing, Trends and Development, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2011.
• Automatically Tagging Email by Leveraging Other Users’ Folders, Yehuda Koren, Edo Liberty, Yoelle Maarek and Roman Sandler. KDD’2011, San-Diego, CA, Aug 2011
•  I Want to Answer, Who Has a Question? Yahoo! Answers Recommender System, Gideon Dror, Yehuda Koren, Yoelle Maarek, Idan Szpektor. KDD’2011, San-Diego, CA, Aug 2011
• Predicting Web Searcher Satisfaction with Existing Community-based Answers. Q. Liu, E. Agichtein, G. Dror, E. Gabrilovich, Y. Maarek, D. Pelleg and I. Szpektor. SIGIR'2011, Beijing, China, July 2011
•  Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates. I. Szpektor, A. Gionis and Y. Maarek. WWW'2011, Hyderabad, India, April 2011.
• Web Retrieval chapter in “Modern Information Retrieval, 2nd edition”, R. Baeza-Yates and Y. Maarek.  Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto eds., Addison-Wesley, February 2011. 
• Do you want to take notes? identifying research missions in Yahoo! Search Pad. D. Donato, F. Bonchi, T. Chi and Y. Maarek. WWW'2010, Raleigh, NC, USA, May 2010. Featured paper.