Yoelle Maarek facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Yoelle Maarek
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Maarek in 2017
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| Born | June 1, 1962 |
| Alma mater | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Pierre and Marie Curie University |
| Known for | Information Retrieval |
| Awards | ACM Fellow (2013) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Amazon, Yahoo, Google, IBM |
Yoelle Maarek is a computer scientist born in Tunisia, who is also an Israeli citizen. She is a top researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and information retrieval. This means she helps computers find and understand information.
Currently, she is the Chief Research of AI/IR for the Technology Innovation Institute. Before this, she was a Vice President at Amazon. There, she led the research for Alexa Shopping. She has also worked at Yahoo and Google, where she helped create important search technologies.
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Meet Yoelle Maarek: Her Journey in Computer Science
Early Life and Education
Yoelle Maarek was born on June 1, 1962, in Tunis. When she was just one year old, her family moved to France. Her father, Armand, was a civil engineer. Her mother, Claire, volunteered for Jewish organizations in France.
Yoelle studied at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. She then earned an advanced studies degree from Pierre and Marie Curie University. After this, she started her PhD studies at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She focused on programming languages.
During her PhD, she spent a year at Columbia University in New York. There, she learned about search engines from Professor Gail Kaiser. When she returned to Israel in 1989, she decided to change her research area to search engines.
Building a Career in Tech
After finishing her PhD, Yoelle Maarek moved back to the United States. She started working at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York. At IBM, she led the team that created the company's first search engine, called "Guru." She worked at IBM from 1989 to 2006. She became a very respected engineer there.
In 2006, she joined Google. She founded the Google Haifa Engineering Center in Haifa, Israel. One of her main projects there was developing the autocompletion feature for Google and YouTube searches. This is the feature that suggests words as you type.
From 2009 to 2017, she worked at Yahoo Research in Israel. In August 2017, she moved to Amazon. She became the Vice President of Worldwide Research for Alexa Shopping.
Yoelle Maarek has also helped organize major computer science conferences. She is a member of the Board of Governors for the Technion. In 2013, she was recognized as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This award is for her important work in leading technology and improving search engines.
Awards and Achievements
Yoelle Maarek has received several honors for her work:
- In 2009 and 2013, the Israeli newspaper Globes named her one of the 50 most influential women in Israel.
- In 2013, she was elected as an ACM Fellow. This is a high honor in computer science.
- In 2014, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz listed her as one of 66 Israeli women "worth getting to know."
- In 2014, Business Insider ranked her #12 among the 22 most powerful women engineers in the world.
