You will replace Oded Cohen, the director of the laboratory for the past 16 years, who will retire later this year. At the same time, Sofer will continue to serve as vice president of artificial intelligence technologies at IBM Research
Dr. Aya Sofer was appointed director of the IBM research laboratory in Haifa. Sofer will replace Oded Cohen, director of the laboratory for the past 16 years, who will retire later this year. At the same time, Sofer will continue to serve as the vice president of artificial intelligence technologies at IBM Research. In this position, she leads researchers in Israel and the world who focus on processing and understanding natural language and artificial intelligence-based speech systems for the business sector.
The laboratory in Haifa is IBM's largest outside the US and focuses on deep technological research in a number of the company's core areas such as artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud technologies, cyber encryption and cryptography, blockchain, quantum computing and the medicine of the future. In its 49 years of existence, the laboratory gave birth to a series of innovative developments that had a significant impact on the high-tech industry and on IBM itself, in the field of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, storage, replication and digital medicine. In his years as director of the laboratory, Oded established it as a leader in its field by combining deep research and business applications, to ensure that technological innovation will also have a significant impact on the reality of our lives. Oded Hater encouraged pragmatic results-oriented research and built an extensive network of relationships with the Israeli technological ecosystem - young and old companies, development centers of international companies, investors and bodies in the public sector and the other multinational companies in Israel.
Dr. Sofer, who will now assume the position of director of the laboratory, has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Hebrew University and a master's and a master's degree from the University of Maryland. She started her career at IBM Research but also served in senior management positions in other divisions of the company. In her 22 years at IBM, she led research that became commercial solutions in the fields of big data and artificial intelligence. Among other things, she was a partner in the development of Watson - IBM's artificial intelligence platform and was one of the leaders of the Debater project - a system that is able to produce dialogue with humans in real time and without human intervention. She has participated in writing more than 50 academic articles and is a senior member of the steering committees of academic conferences in her research fields. Before joining IBM, she served as a researcher at NASA and a research fellow at the Technion.
"I am thrilled to be given such a significant role at IBM, which has an impact that resonates beyond technological research and even beyond the company's fields of activity. I accept a great responsibility to lead a laboratory that has grown generations of excellent researchers and groundbreaking research, and has been one of the pillars of Israeli technological research for decades. I am convinced that we will continue to serve as a source of knowledge and professionalism, and hope that we can also serve as a source of inspiration, curiosity and striving for excellence for young women and men. Technology is not an end in itself, but is meant to serve man and enable him to solve humanity's deep problems and face challenges and crises like the one we are experiencing today - and that is why we get up in the morning every day and go to work."
