Tao Yang
Professor of Computer Science
Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Ask.com
tyang at cs dot ucsb
(805) 893-4384
Tao Yang received the B.S. degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University, China, in 1984, the M.E. degree in Artificial Intelligence from Zhejiang University in 1987. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1990 and 1993. Tao Yang joined the Department of Computer Science at UCSB in 1993. His research has been in the areas of parallel and distributed systems, Internet search, cluster-based services, and high performance scientific computing with over ninety refereed conference and journal papers.
Tao Yang is Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Ask.com in charge of core search technology and products. He has been Vice President of Search Development and the Chief Scientist of ASK.com (formally Ask Jeeves) from 2003 to 2005 as the head of Ask Jeeves/Teoma search development division. He was the founding Chief Scientist and Vice President of Research and Development since 2000 for Teoma Technologies , a startup company for Internet search and acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2001.
As chief scientist and an executive at Ask.com/Teoma, Tao Yang has led teams of scientists and engineers for the design and implementation of a next-generation search engine that powers Ask.com, teoma.com, and other major sites. He has co-invented and architected scalable search algorithms and systems for page indexing, retrieval, ranking, classification, and anti-spamming. He has been directly responsible for scaling search architectures and algorithms that handle millions of documents, to giant systems that can handle multiple billions of documents in terms of relevancy, performance, and freshness.
Dr. Yang received the Research Initiation Award from NSF in 1994, UC Regents' Junior Faculty Award in 1994, the Computer Science Faculty Teacher Award in 1995 from the UCSB College of Engineering, and the CAREER Award from NSF in 1997, and Noble Jeeviant Award from AskJeeves, 2002.
Other Activities:
He is a PC member of WWW 2008, ECIR 2008, ECIR'07, InfoScale'07, CIKM'07, AIRWEB'07, ICPP'07, IEEE INFOCOM'06 , AIRWEB'06, IEEE INFOCOM'05 , and AIRWEB'05 . He is a vice chair for the program committee of ICPP'04 (33rd International Conference on Parallel Processing), a PC member of . IEEE/ACM SC'04 , ICPADS'04, IEEE/ACM SC'03, ICPP'02, IPDPS'2001, ICPP'2001, and SAINT'2001. He was the PC chair for Irregular'99 , a PC member for ICPP'99, IPPS'98 , ICPP'98, Irregular'98 , and HiPC'98. He was the tutorials chair and a PC member for IPPS'97 (11th International Parallel Processing Symposium), a PC member and local organizer of Irregular'96 (Third International Workshop on Parallel Algorithms for Irregularly Structured Problems), a PC member of Euro-Par'96, the 8th IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing in 1996, and the 3rd International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC). He was the local arrangements and registration co-chair for the ACM PPoPP and ACM SPAA in 1995.
Dr. Yang was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems from 1999 to 2002. He was on the editorial board of Journal Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, Chapman Hall (1995-2002), and was a guest editor for Parallel Computing journal and Parallel Processing Letters.
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