Aya Soffer

Aya Chasia Soffer (Hebrew: איה סופר) is an Israeli computer scientist, vice president for AI Technology in IBM Research, and the director of IBM's Israel research laboratory.^[1]

Aya Soffer
איה סופר
Education	Hebrew U. (B.S.) U. of Maryland (Ph.D.)
Employer	IBM
Scientific career
Thesis	Retrieval by Content in Symbolic-Image Databases  (1995)
Doctoral advisor	Hanan Samet
Website	IBM Research profile

Education and career

Soffer is the daughter of two scientists.^[2] She received her bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986^[2][3] and worked in the medical imaging industry for four years^[2] before continuing to the department of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park where she received a master's degree in 1992 and her PhD in 1995.^[4] Her dissertation, Retrieval by Content in Symbolic-Image Databases, concerned information retrieval, and was supervised by Hanan Samet.^[5]

After receiving her PhD she worked for the Goddard Space Flight Center as a research scientist working on NASA digital libraries for Earth science data. She began working at IBM in 1999.^[4] She was part of the IBM Watson project,^[6] and beginning in 2012, IBM's Project Debater, before taking on her current responsibilities as vice president for AI Technology and head of the Haifa laboratory for IBM Research.^[2]

Recognition

Soffer was named one of the most influential women ("Power Women") by Forbes Israel in 2019,^[7] in 2020 she was named of the 100 most influential people influencing life in Israel by TheMarker,^[8] and in 2021 one of the 50 most influential women in Israel by Globes^[9]