Welcome to my home page!
About me: After numerous years at IBM Research (first in the US and then in Israel), I joined Google to open its first engineering center in Israel in 2006. I led the Google Haifa Engineering Center and grew it to close to 40 staff members. We worked on various projects in Search, YouTube and Gmail. Our two most visible launches were Google Suggest (now called "query auto-completion"), YouTube Video Annotations.
I joined Yahoo! Labs in 2009 to head its Israel Research team. We are now a team of scientists and research engineers working on a number of exciting efforts with both a clear research angle and impact on Yahoo! Products. We specialize in mining what we call "Web content with an author", more specifically Mail and Community Question Answering data. With Yahoo! Mail and its few hundreds millions of users and Yahoo! Answers and its 1B posted answers as of last year, we can do quite a lot of large scale (privacy preserving) data mining and think of new features all the time. See some of our related recent publications below, stay tuned for related upcoming launches!
Here is a more professional looking bio that says more about my past.
Contact me: To send me mail, just concatenate yoelle with the usual @ and ymail.com
This tedious explanation should take care of most robots :-)
Yahoo! Israel is located in Park Matam in Haifa, just across the beach, in Tower 3, top floor. Don't look for a phone number, I believe in email:-)
Recent Research activities: I was PC chair of WWW'2009 (with Wolfgang Nejdl), WSDM'2012 (with Eugene Agichtein) and am currently serving as PC chair of SIGIR'2012 (with Jamie Callan and Mark Sanderson). I have served as Senior PC of multiple WWW,WSDM and SIGIR conferences in the past few years.
Selected recent publications: from these past 2 years (see Full list of publications)
- Anna Shtok, Gideon Dror, Yoelle Maarek and Idan Szpektor, Learning from the Past: Answering New Questions with Past Answers. In Proceedings of WWW'2012, Lyon, France, April 2012.
- Yehuda Koren, Edo Liberty, Yoelle Maarek and Roman Sandler, Automatically tagging email by leveraging other users' folders. KDD 2011, San-Diego, CA, Aug 2011
- Gideon Dror, Yehuda Koren, Yoelle Maarek, Idan Szpektor, I want to answer; who has a question?: Yahoo! answers recommender system. KDD 2011, San-Diego, CA, Aug 2011
- Qiaoling Liu, Eugene Agichtein, Gideon Dror, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Y. Maarek, D. Pelleg and I. Szpektor, Predicting web searcher satisfaction with existing community-based answers. In Proceedings of SIGIR'2011, Beijing, China, July 2011
- R. Baeza-Yates and Y. Maarek, Web retrieval: the role of users. Tutorial in SIGIR '11 Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval, 2011, Beijing, China (earlier versions of this tutorial were presented at WSDM'2011, Hong-Kong, China, February 2011 and at ECIR'2011, Dublin, Ireland, April 2011 and SIGIR'2010, Geneva Switzerland).
- I. Szpektor, A. Gionis and Y. Maarek, Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates. In Proceedings of WWW'2011, Hyderabad, India, April 2011.
- R. Baeza-Yates, A. Broder and Y. Maarek, The new frontier of Web Search Technology: Seven challenges. In Search and Computing, Trends and Development, S. Ceri and M. Brambilla (eds). LNCS 6585, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2011.
- R. Baeza-Yates and Y. Maarek, Web Retrieval chapter. In "Modern Information Retrieval, 2nd edition", Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto eds., Addison-Wesley, February 2011. Chapter can be downloaded from the book site
- David Carmel, Vanja Josifovski, Yoelle Maarek, User modeling for web applications. Workshop organized at WSDM '11 Hong Kong, China, February, 2011
- D. Donato, F. Bonchi, T. Chi and Y. Maarek, Do you want to take notes?: identifying research missions in Yahoo! search pad. In Proceedings of WWW'2010, Raleigh, NC, USA, May 2010- Featured paper.
I am in general happy to talk about Web search, social applications and research in general, as well as how it is to work in high tech in the northern area of Israel.