Yoelle Maarek is a Tunisian-born Israeli computer scientist. She is the Vice President of Worldwide Research at

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

,Amazon’s New Israeli Offices Are Prefabs Erected on Parking Lot in Days
Calcalist responsible for Amazon's Alexa Shopping Research.. Maarek is a researcher in the field of search engines and data mining, and a former vice president at Yahoo! (

Yahoo! Labs Yahoo! Labs served as Yahoo!'s research arm, aiming to develop research in technologies to be used within the company. Yahoo! Labs includes approximately 200 research scientists and engineers. Yahoo! Labs is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA; it h ...

) and Director of

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

in Israel and in India. Maarek was the first engineer of Google Israel and established the first development center in

Haifa Haifa ( he, חֵיפָה ' ; ar, حَيْفَا ') is the third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropol ...

in 2006.

Biography

Early years

Maarek was born on June 1, 1962, in

Tunis ''Tounsi'' french: Tunisois , population_note = , population_urban = , population_metro = 2658816 , population_density_km2 = , timezone1 = CET , utc_offset1 ...

. When she was one year old, her family immigrated to

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

. Her father, Armand was a civil engineer, and her mother Claire volunteered for Zionist organizations in France. Maarek did her undergraduate studies at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

, earned a

diplôme d'études approfondies A Master of Advanced Studies or Master of Advanced Study (MAS, M.A.S., or MASt) is a postgraduate degree awarded in various countries. Master of Advanced Studies programs may be non-consecutive programs tailored for "specific groups of working pro ...

from

Pierre and Marie Curie University Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public university, public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussi ...

. After completing her master's course, she began her doctoral studies at the Technion in the field of programming languages. During her doctoral studies, she spent a year as a visiting student at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in New York, where she was exposed to the field of search engines under the guidance of Prof. Gail Kaiser. After returning to Israel to complete her doctorate at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1989, she decided to change her field of research into search engines, under the supervision of Daniel M. Berry.

Career

After completing her doctorate, she returned to the

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and began working at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York State. As part of her role, she led the team that developed the company's first search engine, called "Guru".IBM Israel’s R&D labs justify their huge prestige
ISRAEL21c Maarek worked at IBM from 1989 until 2006, and became a distinguished engineer at IBM before moving to

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. In 2006, she founded the Google Haifa Engineering Center in

, Israel, where one of her key projects involved

autocompletion Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...

for Google and

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queries. During 2009-2017 she worked in

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

research in Israel. From August 2017, she joined Amazon's Alexa Shopping Research and became the company's new Vice President of Worldwide Research. Maarek has served as program committee co-chair for WWW 2009, WSDM 2012 and SIGIR 2012. She is also a member of the Board of Governors of the Technion.. In 2013, Maarek was elected as a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

"for contributions to industrial leadership and to information retrieval and web search."

Recognitions

*In 2009 and 2013, she was chosen as one of the 50 most influential women in Israel by the newspaper

Globes A globe is a spherical model of Earth, of some other celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but unlike maps, they do not distort the surface that they portray except to scale it down. A model globe of ...

. *In 2013, she was elected as an ACM Fellow. *In 2014, she was chosen by the Israeli newspaper

Haaretz ''Haaretz'' ( , originally ''Ḥadshot Haaretz'' – , ) is an Israeli newspaper. It was founded in 1918, making it the longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel, and is now published in both Hebrew and English in the Berliner f ...

as one of the 66 Israeli women "worth getting to know". *In 2014, she was ranked in #12 of the 22 most powerful women engineers in the world by

Business Insider ''Insider'', previously named ''Business Insider'' (''BI''), is an American financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Insider''s parent company Insider Inc. has been owned by the German publ ...

. 22 Of The Most Powerful Women Engineers In The World

Family

Maarek is married to Frank Smadja and has three children.

References

External links

Biography
at Yahoo Labs * {{DEFAULTSORT:Maarek, Yoelle Israeli computer scientists Israeli women computer scientists École des Ponts ParisTech alumni Pierre and Marie Curie University alumni Technion – Israel Institute of Technology alumni Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Tunisian Jews Israeli people of Tunisian-Jewish descent