Sihem Amer-Yahia joined Yahoo! Research in May 2006. Prior to that, she worked for seven years at AT&T Labs after receiving her Ph.D. in CS from U. Paris XI-Orsay and INRIA, France. Sihem is interested in the role of structured data on the Web and the use of techniques at the intersection of databases, information retrieval and recommender systems.

In LiveAds, she is looking at enabling the seamless serving of catalog listings and text ads in sponsored search.

In GUESTS, she focuses on leveraging common behavior on social content sites to serve better content to users and encourage their participation to online communities. A core algorithmic challenge is the adaptation of top-k processing to dynamically computed scores. The ultimate goal is the design query primitives and user interfaces which efficiently integrate social behavior in search and recommendations and effectively account for user feedback.

Sihem is serving as a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Springer Verlag. Co-editors: Tamer Oszu, Ling Liu.

Her most recent keynote talks are "How Could We All Get Along on the Web 2.0? (The Power of Structured Data on the Web)" at DB/IR NYU Stern, Oct 2006, "What's Hot in working on New Technology: The power of having a user base" at the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference, San Diego, Nov 2006 and "GUESTS: Groups of Users going Social in Web Two.0 Search" at WebDB 2007.

Sihem serves on PCs of major DB conferences. She is co-chairing the Web 2.0 track at ICDE 2008 and chairing the DB track at CIKM 2008.