Soffer is the daughter of two scientists. She received her bachelor's degree from the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986 and worked in the
medical imaging industry for four years Her dissertation,
Retrieval by Content in Symbolic-Image Databases, concerned
information retrieval, and was supervised by
Hanan Samet. After receiving her PhD she worked for the
Goddard Space Flight Center as a research scientist working on
NASA digital libraries for Earth science data. She began working at IBM in 1999. and beginning in 2012, IBM's
Project Debater, before taking on her current responsibilities as vice president for AI Technology and head of the Haifa laboratory for IBM Research. == Recognition ==