Dr. Yoelle Maarek

Dr. Yoelle Maarek is Chief Researcher for AI/IR at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a leading global scientific research center based in the UAE. She leads the development of new methods to improve the capabilities of TII’s family of Large Language Models, Falcon. Dr. Maarek brings to her role more than three decades of experience in conducting research and development in information retrieval, web search, and data mining.

Prior to TII, Dr. Maarek held executive roles at several tech companies such as Amazon, where she served as Vice President of Science and Research, overseeing global operations for Alexa Shopping Research. She was also the Vice President of Research at Yahoo. She also held top level positions with IBM Research, first in the US, then in Israel. Later, she served as the Director of Engineering at Google, where she opened the first engineering center in Israel and launched Google Suggest. Throughout her illustrious career, she has led the launch of multiple products and features, as well as published more than 80 research articles and holds dozens of patents.

Dr. Maarek earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel in 1989, and an engineering degree from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, and a diplôme d'études approfondies (DEA) in Computer Science from Paris VI University, both conferred in 1985.

Dr. Yoelle Maarek is an ACM Fellow, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and of the ACM SIGIR Academy.