Aya Soffer

Director of Information Management for Analytics Research

Research lab: Haifa Research Lab

Aya Soffer is the Director of Information Management for Analytics Research in IBM. As a Research director, Aya addresses the new opportunities in information management for analytics research and has a global role in driving the software research strategy in information management for analytics, ensuring IBM's position as a premier software research organization in this area and delivering our technologies to SWG and other IBM channels to maximize the value for our clients.

The underlying business problem that Aya and the world-wide Research teams are focused on is analyzing the vast amounts of information being created today and extracting insight to help improve business outcome. Together with teams across the globe, Aya works to extend Research into the marketplace, using large scale information analytics and management to help customers make smarter decisions.

As Department Group Manager at the IBM Research Lab in Haifa, Israel, Aya manages the Information and Interaction Technologies department. She and her teams have developed several solutions for IBM products and services. These solutions include novel search engine technologies that have been integrated into many IBM products and services including WebSphere Portal, OmniFind Enterprise Edition, Cognos Content Analyzer, and more. Recently her work has focused around merging Web 2.0 concepts with Search technology. The fruits of these efforts, IBM's first social search engine, have been released as part of Lotus connections and are being considered for deployment on IBM's corporate Web site.

As a global Research leader, one of the main challenges and that Aya faces is working with the different groups across the labs to shape a common agenda so the 'whole is greater than the sum of the parts'. She also works to leverage the labs' presence worldwide to understand the information analytics needs of customers in various geos and influence the research agenda accordingly.

Aya is a member of the SW Research Strategy Board, which drives IBM Research global research directions. She also serves as the IBM Research relationship manager to Ambuj Goyal, GM of Business Analytics and Process Optimization and Arvid Krishna, GM of Information Management.

Aya received her MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1992 and 1995, respectively. Before joining IBM in 1999, she was a research scientist at NASA Goddard space flight center, where she worked on digital libraries for earth science data. Aya has published over 30 papers in referred journals and conferences and filed over 15 patents. She also served on program committees and as track chair in many leading conferences. Her research interests include information retrieval, pictorial information systems, Geographic information systems, social search, and text analytics.

Contact:
Internet e-mail: ayas@il.ibm.com
Tel: +972-4-8296369
Snail Mail: IBM Research - Haifa, Haifa University Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel
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Last updated 20 Nov 2009