David Carmel

David Carmel
דוד כרמל
Born (1955-08-12) August 12, 1955, Beit HaShita, Israel
Known forInformation Retrieval
Scientific career
InstitutionsTII, Amazon, Yahoo, IBM, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Websitehttps://davidcarmel.org/

David Carmel (born 1955) is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in Information retrieval (IR).[1] He is a Distinguished Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Haifa, where his research focuses on IR and generative AI.[2] David is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.[3]

He is an ACM Distinguished Member since 2016[4] and an SIGIR Academy member since 2025.[5]

Early years

David Carmel was born in 1955 in Kibbutz Beit HaShita, Israel, to his parents Dan and Elka Carmel. He learned computer science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology,[6] specializing in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems.[7] David completed his PhD in 1997 under the supervision of Shaul Markovitch.[8]

Career

Upon graduating, David Carmel joined IBM Haifa Research Labs, working on information retrieval system. He led the team that achieved the best Precision@10 score at the TREC conference in the “ad-hoc” Web search track in 2001.[9] Another area he explored was efficiency, first with static index pruning, published with Ronald Fagin, Yoelle Maarek and others at SIGIR 2001,[10] and with dynamic pruning based on the WAND algorithm published at CIKM 2003, jointly with Andrei Broder and others.[11] The WAND algorithm was extended later by many other researchers in the community,[12] and is cited by more than 550 academic papers.[13]

David Carmel contributed to the development of the XML Fragments query language, which adopted a classical IR approach for XML search by embedding the XML query and the XML fragments into the same search space.[14] The XML search engine, relying on XML Fragments, achieved top results at the INEX competition over the years 2002-2006.[15]

Another major area of David's research was query difficulty estimation. David, jointly with Dr. Elad Yom-Tov,[16] published a book entitled Estimating the Query Difficulty for Information Retrieval.[17] David’s paper on “Learning to Estimate the Query Difficulty”, together with Elad Yom-Tov and others,[18] earned the best paper award at SIGIR 2005.[19] This research direction had led to a long collaboration with Prof. Oren Kurland[20] and his students at the Technion.[21][22][23]

David Carmel contributed to the IBM Watson project, which competed against human champions on the television quiz show Jeopardy![24][25] The significant public interest in this project resulted in several interviews and articles in the Israeli local media.[26][27][28]

David joined Yahoo Labs in 2013 and contributed to multiple research efforts, in particular, devising a new ranking algorithm for Web Mail Search,[29][30] that were deployed in Yahoo mail and helped revive a dormant area of research.[31][32]

Between 2017 and 2023, David served as a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon,[33] where he worked on voice product question answering with Alexa (Amazon’s voice assistant). The results of this research were deployed in Alexa's product question asnwering and led to several publications.[34][35][36][37]

Since 2024, David has been serving as a Distinguished Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), focusing on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Large Language Model, thus combining his early days’ experience with AI and his current interest in search.[38]

Teaching and Academia

Throughout his industrial career, David maintained ties with academia. He was a part-time lecturer for several years in courses on artificial intelligence and information retrieval in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa.[2] As of 2024, he was appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at the Technion, in the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences,[39] supervising MsC and PhD students.[40][41][42]

Publications

Dr. David Carmel has published more than 150 papers[43] in leading international journals and conferences, including SIGIR, WWW, Wed Search and Data Mining (WSDM),[44] and CIKM. He is listed as the inventor on more than 60 patents registered in the United States and internationally.[45]

References

  1. ^ "David Carmel (ACM Profile)".
  2. ^ a b "David Carmel (Researchgate Profile)". researchgate.net.
  3. ^ "Research Fellows". Technion.ac.il.
  4. ^ ACM Distinguished Members, Association for Computing Machinery, 2016
  5. ^ SIGIR Academy, SIGIR, 2025
  6. ^ "David Carmel". grad-old.technion.ac.il.
  7. ^ David Carmel. "Model-based Learning of Interaction Strategies in Multi-agent Systems (PhD thesis)" (PDF).
  8. ^ "Shaul Markovitch's Home page".
  9. ^ David Hawking and Nick Craswell. "Overview fo the TREC-2001 Web Track" (PDF).
  10. ^ Carmel, David; Cohen, Doron; Fagin, Ronald; Farchi, Eitan; Herscovici, Michael; Maarek, Yoelle S.; Soffer, Aya (2001). "Static Index Pruning for Information Retrieval Systems". Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. pp. 43–50. doi:10.1145/383952.383958. ISBN 1-58113-331-6.
  11. ^ Broder, Andrei Z.; Carmel, David; Herscovici, Michael; Soffer, Aya; Zien, Jason (2003). "Efficient query evaluation using a two-level retrieval process" (PDF). Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on Information and knowledge management. pp. 426–434. doi:10.1145/956863.956944. ISBN 1-58113-723-0. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-05-21. Retrieved 2025-08-15.
  12. ^ Petri, Matthias; Culpepper, J. Shane; Moffat, Alistair (2013). "Exploring the magic of WAND". Proceedings of the 18th Australasian Document Computing Symposium. pp. 58–65. doi:10.1145/2537734.2537744. ISBN 978-1-4503-2524-0.
  13. ^ "Efficient query evaluation using a two-level retrieval process (Google scholar)".
  14. ^ Carmel, David; Maarek, Yoelle S.; Mandelbrod, Matan; Mass, Yosi; Soffer, Aya (2003). "Searching XML documents via XML fragments". Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval. pp. 151–158. doi:10.1145/860435.860464. ISBN 1-58113-646-3.
  15. ^ Lalmas, Mounia; Tombros, Anastasios (2007). "Evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness at INEX". ACM SIGIR Forum. 41: 40–57. doi:10.1145/1273221.1273225.
  16. ^ "Elad Yom-Tov homepage".
  17. ^ David Carmel and Elad Yom-Tov (2010). Estimating the Query Difficulty for Information Retrieval. Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-02272-2. ISBN 978-3-031-01144-3.
  18. ^ Yom-Tov, Elad; Fine, Shai; Carmel, David; Darlow, Adam (2005). "Learning to estimate query difficulty: Including applications to missing content detection and distributed information retrieval". Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. pp. 512–519. doi:10.1145/1076034.1076121. ISBN 1-59593-034-5.
  19. ^ "Best Paper Awards at SIGIR".
  20. ^ "Oren Kurland's home page".
  21. ^ Shtok, Anna; Kurland, Oren; Carmel, David; Raiber, Fiana; Markovits, Gad (2012). "Predicting query performance by query-drift estimation". ACM Transactions on Information Systems. 30 (2): 1–35. doi:10.1145/2180868.2180873.
  22. ^ Shtok, Anna; Kurland, Oren; Carmel, David (2016). "Query performance prediction using reference lists". ACM Transactions on Information Systems. 34 (4): 1–34. doi:10.1145/2926790.
  23. ^ Kurland, Oren; Shtok, Anna; Hummel, Shay; Raiber, Fiana; Carmel, David; Rom, Ofri (2012). "Back to the roots: A probabilistic framework for query-performance prediction". Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management. pp. 823–832. doi:10.1145/2396761.2396866. ISBN 978-1-4503-1156-4.
  24. ^ Chu-Carroll, J.; Fan, J.; Boguraev, B. K.; Carmel, D.; Sheinwald, D.; Welty, C. (2012). "Finding needles in the haystack: Search and candidate generation" (PDF). IBM Journal of Research and Development. 56 (3.4): 6:1–6:12. doi:10.1147/JRD.2012.2186682.
  25. ^ "The DeepQA project (Haifa Research Lab)". 22 April 2009.
  26. ^ לא ניסינו לחקות את תהליך המחשבה האנושי. רצינו רק לנצח בג'פרדי, The Marker, 2011
  27. ^ דויד כרמל מיבמ מסביר איך יצר את המחשב שניצח בג'פרדי, The Marker, 2012
  28. ^ אדם מול מכונה: IBM ווטסון מול אלופי הג'פרדי, University of Haifa, 2012
  29. ^ Carmel, David; Lewin-Eytan, Liane; Libov, Alex; Maarek, Yoelle; Raviv, Ariel (2017). "Promoting Relevant Results in Time-Ranked Mail Search" (PDF). Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. pp. 1551–1559. doi:10.1145/3038912.3052659. ISBN 978-1-4503-4913-0.
  30. ^ Carmel, David; Halawi, Guy; Lewin-Eytan, Liane; Maarek, Yoelle; Raviv, Ariel (2015). "Rank by Time or by Relevance?: Revisiting Email Search". Proceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. pp. 283–292. doi:10.1145/2806416.2806471. ISBN 978-1-4503-3794-6.
  31. ^ Liane Lewin-Eytan and Yoelle Maarek (2017). "Reinventing Mail Search and solving the catch 22 problem". Yahoo Research Blog.
  32. ^ Maarek, Yoelle (2017). "Web Mail is not Dead!: It's Just Not Human Anymore". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. p. 5. doi:10.1145/3038912.3050916. ISBN 978-1-4503-4913-0.
  33. ^ "Amazon at WSDM". 5 March 2021.
  34. ^ Carmel, David; Lewin-Eytan, Liane; Maarek, Yoelle (2018). "Product Question Answering Using Customer Generated Content - Research Challenges". The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval. pp. 1349–1350. doi:10.1145/3209978.3210203. ISBN 978-1-4503-5657-2.
  35. ^ Carmel, David; Haramaty, Elad; Lazerson, Arnon; Lewin-Eytan, Liane; Maarek, Yoelle (2020). "Why do People Buy Seemingly Irrelevant Items in Voice Product Search?: On the Relation between Product Relevance and Customer Satisfaction in eCommerce". Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. pp. 79–87. doi:10.1145/3336191.3371780. ISBN 978-1-4503-6822-3.
  36. ^ Filice, Simone; Cohen, Nachshon; Carmel, David (2020). "Voice-based Reformulation of Community Answers". Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020. pp. 2885–2891. doi:10.1145/3366423.3380053. ISBN 978-1-4503-7023-3.
  37. ^ Carmel, David; Haramaty, Elad; Lazerson, Arnon; Lewin-Eytan, Liane (2020). "Multi-Objective Ranking Optimization for Product Search Using Stochastic Label Aggregation". Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020. pp. 373–383. doi:10.1145/3366423.3380122. ISBN 978-1-4503-7023-3.
  38. ^ Filice, Simone; Horowitz, Guy; Carmel, David; Karnin, Zohar; Lewin-Eytan, Liane; Maarek, Yoelle (2025). "Generating Q&A Benchmarks for RAG Evaluation in Enterprise Settings". Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track). pp. 469–484. doi:10.18653/v1/2025.acl-industry.33. ISBN 979-8-89176-288-6.
  39. ^ "Research fellows at the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion". The Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences.
  40. ^ Huly, Oz; Pogrebinsky, Idan; Carmel, David; Kurland, Oren; Maarek, Yoelle (2024). "Old IR Methods Meet RAG". Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. pp. 2559–2563. doi:10.1145/3626772.3657935. ISBN 979-8-4007-0431-4.
  41. ^ Huly, Oz; Carmel, David; Kurland, Oren (2025). "Predicting RAG Performance for Text Completion". Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. pp. 1283–1293. doi:10.1145/3726302.3730062. ISBN 979-8-4007-1592-1.
  42. ^ Pogrebinsky, Idan; Carmel, David; Kurland, Oren (2025). "Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Text Completion Through Query Selection". Proceedings of the 2025 International ACM SIGIR Conference on Innovative Concepts and Theories in Information Retrieval (ICTIR). pp. 410–415. doi:10.1145/3731120.3744610. ISBN 979-8-4007-1861-8.
  43. ^ "Google Scholar - David Carmel's page".
  44. ^ "The ACM Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) Conference".
  45. ^ "Google Patents - inventor: David Carmel".
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