Aya Soffer is Director of Information Management for Analytics Research in IBM. In this role, Aya is driving the world-wide software research strategy in information management for analytics, ensuring IBM's position as a premier software research organization in this area and delivering Research technologies to IBM's software products and customers. In the Haifa Research Lab, Aya is the Department Group Manager of the Information and Interaction Technologies department that focuses on inventing and developing cutting edge technology that connects people and systems to information. Many of these innovations are already included in IBM product and services offerings. IBM’s product groups and customers to drive Research innovation in to the Market.
Aya additionally leads IBM Research's Massive Scale Analytics Big Bet, an effort to develop new technologies to facilitate making smart decisions from information at very large scales. This is a world-wide effort across seven Research labs focusing on extracting insight from the vast amount of information gathered from heterogeneous sources and make it readily available to decision makers where and when they need it 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 has additionally served on program committees and as track chair in many leading conferences.Her research interests include information retrieval, Big Data analytics, pictorial information systems, and Healthcare analytics.