PhD in machine learning, 20+ years experience in industrial research, including management of multiple research teams.

Analyzing data for insights and actions. Focusing on the climate domain, more precisely on the energy sector. Always in search of problem areas which would have a lasting impact on society.

Previously, Senior Director of Research at Yahoo. Responsibilities over a search team, a user modeling team, and a mail team. Also site lead for the Haifa lab.

Before that, IBM master inventor and a Yahoo master inventor, with over 20 patents issued. I published over 40 academic, peer-reviewed papers. One of the ICML papers I authored has a citation count of over 3300 (according to Google scholar, which also reports my h-index as 25).

My Ph.D. is from CMU, under Andrew Moore, on "efficient implementations of statistical machine learning algorithms". That led to a widely-cited paper on K-Means (with a widely-used software package), and the main application area was astrophysics.

I support open-source software, and in the past I maintained several FreeBSD ports and contributed documentation to the FreeBSD handbook.

• September 2023: I built an electricity-cost calculator to compare different suppliers.
• August 2023: Another indictment for air pollution, based on data which I and others collected, and was presented in the State Comptroller's report in 2019.
• August 2022: Indictment for air pollution, based on data which I and others collected, and was presented in the State Comptroller's report in 2019.
• May 2022: I started a data visualization blog, discussion presentation of data in media and various topical data analyses.
• January 2021: I built a dashboard for mud/rain conditions on bicycle trails.
• June 2019: The State Comptroller published a report on air pollution. I, with others, helped proved materials and analysis, to jump-start and to support the investigation.
• November 2015: I co-organized the live-QA challenge at TREC-2015
• August 2015: I co-organized the webQA workshop at SIGIR 2015.
• December 2013: A post I co-authored was published in the Yahoo labs blog, on UGC as typed on mobile devices.
• October 2012: A paper I co-authored is mentioned in Ha-Aretz (a major Israeli newspaper). It's about the way cancer patients search for information on the web.
• May 2013: My ICML 2000 paper reached over 1000 gscholar citations.
• June 2010: I was local organization co-chair for ICML 2010. Here is an IBM press release with a bad photo.
• June 2009: After 13 years of operation, I shut down LibAgent. It was a web site that helped university students with their library book loans. It had tens of thousands of subscribers. With Nadav Eiron, we hand-coded three tiers (FreeBSD/Apache/Postgres/Perl Mason) and a scraper backend with a mass-mailing system. I also provisioned hardware, configured DNS and firewalls, and did customer service.
• September 2002: I played a very small role in the unearthing of the first online smiley.