M. Sc., PhD
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan

Currently Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University, and formerly Head of its Institute for Information Retrieval and Computational Linguistics (IRCOL) for more than thirty years, Prof. Choueka was born in Cairo in 1936, and immigrated to Israel in 1957, where he got his M.Sc (1962) and Ph.D. (1971) in Mathematics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been affiliated since 1964 with the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Bar Ilan University, where he was promoted to full professor in 1990. In particular, he was one of the developers of the Responsa Project at Bar Ilan University and it Head in 1974 – 1986; the Responsa System won the prestigious Israel Prize in 2007.

Besides a large number of publications in Information Retrieval and in Natural Language Processing, Prof. Choueka was also the Principal Investigator or Director of more than ten very large projects both in academic and business contexts, all of which involved with the processing of large textual corpora and databases.

He has also participated in a great number of international and national conferences (in many of which he was the Keynote or Invited Speaker), and was the Organizer and Chairman of the Eighteenth National Conference of the Information Processing Association of Israel and of the Fifteenth International conference of ALLC, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Information Retrieval in Israel, and the most prominent figure in the Intelligent Processing of Hebrew. The Seventh BISFAI - Bar Ilan International Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence as well the 2004 Annual Conference of ISCOL - the Israeli Society for Computational Linguistics were convened to honor his teaching and research chievements in these areas.

His academic career was also characterized by an intense involvement in computer science education in Israel as well as by chairing or participating in many professional functions associated with the Council of Higher Learning in Israel.

Prof. Choueka was the recipient in 1997 of Israel Prime Minister Prize for Computing, and was twice recipient of the Annual Award of the Association for Information Processing of Israel. The Seventh Bar Ilan International Conference for Foundations of Artificial Intelligence was convened to honor his 35 years of teaching and research, and the Annual Meeting of the Israel Society of Computational Linguistics was convened to honor his retirement.