Bio: Yoelle Maarek is a Senior Director at Yahoo! Research in Haifa, Israel, which she joined in June 2009. Before this, she was an Engineering Director at the Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she founded in March 2006 and grew to close to 40 researchers and software engineers.  Her team at Google Haifa launched one of the most visible features in Web search in the recent years:  "Google Suggest",  a query completion feature that has been deployed on google.com since August 2008 and is available in a series of Google properties, from YouTube, iGoogle to Mobile Search, and this in most languages. The Haifa team launched features in other domains as well, such as Searching Ads (See http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks) and Interactive Annotations on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/t/annotations_about). Prior to this, Yoelle had been with IBM Research since 1989. While at IBM Research, she held a series of technical and management appointments first at the T.J. Watson Research in New York, USA,  and then at the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel until Feb 2006, where she contributed to IBM Enterprise search offerings. Her two last positions were Distinguished Engineer and Department Group Manager in the area of search and collaboration. She graduated from the "Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees" in Paris, France, and received her DEA (graduate degree) in Computer Science from Paris VI University, both in 1985. She was a visiting PhD student at Columbia University in NY in 1986/87. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the Technion, in Haifa, Israel, in 1989. Yoelle's research interests include information retrieval, Web applications, and collaborative technologies. She has published over 50 papers and articles in these fields. She is active in the research community and has served as chair or vice-chair for several technical tracks at the WWW conference series and as senior or regular PC member at most ACM SIGIR  conferences in the last 10 years. She also chaired and moderated multiple workshops and panels at both WWW and SIGIR conferences.  Most recently, she served as co-chair (with Andrei Broder) of the Panels track at WWW'2008 and as co-chair (with Wolfgang Nejdl) of the Technical Program of  WWW'2009, that was held in Madrid in April 2009. Yoelle is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Caesarea-Rotschild Institute at Haifa University and of the Board of Governors of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology since 2009.

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