IndustryAsk Appoints Senior Vice President And Chief Scientist

Ask Appoints Senior Vice President And Chief Scientist

Ask.com has appointed Tao Yang as the new senior vice president and chief scientist of Ask.com. Yang’s role will be to build out Ask.com’s “system infrastructure” and “classification technologies.” Yang was a co-inventor of Ask.com’s search technology, Teoma, now known as ExpertRank.

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Ask.com Appoints Tao Yang Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist

Yang to Drive Continued Development of Ask.com Search Technologies

OAKLAND, Calif., March 16 /PRNewswire/ — Ask.com today announced that Tao Yang, one of the foremost experts in scalable computing and algorithmic search, has been named senior vice president and chief scientist. In his new role, Yang will drive the development and growth of Ask.com search technologies on a global scale, with a key area of focus on continued development of large-scale system infrastructure and classification technologies to deliver the most relevant search experience available for users.

An Ask.com executive since the Company acquired Teoma Technologies, Inc. in 2001, Yang is a co-inventor of the ExpertRank (formally Teoma) search algorithm, having co-led search technology research and development since 2000. Integrated into the Ask.com search engine in 2001, ExpertRank represents the industry’s first search algorithm to determine relevance by evaluating a site’s authority on a specific topic (Subject-Specific Popularity SM) versus the site’s popularity on the Web at large, and executes the required additional computations in real-time. With particular expertise in developing revolutionary search algorithms and building supporting infrastructures, Yang has been directly responsible for scaling search architectures and algorithms that handle millions of pages, to giant-scale systems that can handle billions of documents in terms of relevancy, performance, and freshness.

“Tao’s impact at Ask has been immeasurable, due in large part to his role in transforming Ask.com search into one of only four technologies operating at a world-class level today,” said Steve Berkowitz, Ask.com chief executive officer. “Tao has been instrumental in pioneering some of the most important
developments in the history of search, particularly in the area of large-scale distributed architectures and algorithms, and we look forward to his continued contributions.”

Yang received his bachelor of science in computer science and masters of engineering in artificial intelligence from Zhejiang University, China, in 1984 and 1987 respectively, and his masters of science and Ph.D. in computer science from Rutgers University in 1990 and 1993 respectively. As a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1993, Yang has been a leading expert in the areas of parallel and distributed systems, Internet search, cluster-based services, and high performance scientific computing with over 90 technical publications. He has served on numerous conference program committees, journal editorial boards, and government review panels. Yang was formerly chief scientist and vice president of research and development during Teoma’s startup stage, and was chief scientist and vice president of search development at Ask.com.

About Ask.com

A leading search engine on the Web, Ask.com combines world-class search technology with one-of-a-kind search tools to help people get what they are looking for faster. Ask.com sites include Ask.com US (http://www.Ask.com), Ask.com Deutschland, Ask.com Espana, Ask France, Ask Italia, Ask.com Japan Ask Nederlands and Ask.com UK. Additionally, Ask.com syndicates its search technology and advertising units to a network of affiliate partners. Ask.com is a division of IAC Search & Media, a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

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