Management Team

Jim Safka
CEO
Scott Garell
President
Chuck Geiger
Executive Vice President, Technology & Engineering
Apostolos Gerasoulis
Executive Vice President, Search Technology
Tomasz Imielinski
Senior Vice President, Search Technology
Doug Leeds
Senior Vice President, Product Management
Mary Osako
Senior Vice President, Worldwide Communications
Daniel Read
Senior Vice President, Product Management and User Experience
Mark Stockford
Senior Vice President, Operations
Tao Yang
Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist

Jim Safka
CEO

Jim Safka was named CEO of Ask.com in January 2008. In this role, Safka oversees Ask.com's global operations. He is also CEO of Primal Ventures, a new-venture entity that identifies seeds and incubates business opportunities for Ask.com's parent company, IAC.

Safka served as CEO of Match.com - an IAC property - from 2004 to 2006. Under his leadership, the company grew revenue and operating income before amortization at an annual rate of 25% and 52% respectively. Today, Match.com has more than 15 million members in 35 countries. Prior to serving at Match.com, Safka served as vice president and general manager of e-commerce at AT&T Wireless. Under his leadership, AT&T Wireless sold more wireless plans through its Web site than the other five national carriers combined, and ranked number one in online customer service. Before joining AT&T Wireless in 2002, Safka spent five years at E*TRADE Financial Corporation, most recently as vice president of marketing, where he was instrumental in growing the customer base from 200,000 accounts to more than four million. Safka started his technology marketing career at Intuit as a Product Manager for Quicken Financial Planner and Quicken.com. He also held brand and product management positions at Alberto-Culver, Inc., Warner Bros. Inc., and Paramount Pictures.

Safka holds an M.B.A. from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and a B.S. in Accounting from the University of Southern California.

Scott Garell
President

In January 2008, Scott Garell was named President, Ask.com. In this role, Garell manages the daily business operations for Ask.com worldwide, and reports to CEO Jim Safka.

Since 2005, Garell has been CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals. Under his leadership the Consumer Applications and Portals businesses (including Fun Web Products, Portals, Evite and Pronto) have grown by 74% in the past 3 years. Prior to his role as CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals, Garell, 42, served as Executive Vice President of domestic sites and search, where he managed the division's destination sites (Ask.com, iWon, and My Way), as well as the optimization of its proprietary information retrieval technologies and products across all brands. Garell joined IAC Search & Media in April 2004 as Senior Vice President of Marketing. Formerly, Garell served in senior roles at Computer Associates, Citysearch and Clorox.

Garell holds an M.B.A from the Harvard Business School and a B.A. in Political Economy from the University of California at Berkeley.

Chuck Geiger
Executive Vice President, Technology & Engineering

As executive vice president of technology & engineering for Ask.com, Chuck Geiger is responsible for site and verticals engineering, IT and operations, quality assurance, data engineering and program management. Geiger also oversees engineering for Bloglines.

Geiger joined Ask.com from sports and entertainment startup Protrade.com, where he served first as CTO, and then acting CEO. Prior to Protrade.com, Geiger was CTO of PayPal. Before that, Geiger served as vice president of product development and architecture at eBay and as CTO of Wine.com. Geiger has also held senior-level positions with Gateway, Texas Instruments, SABRE and American Airlines Decision Technologies.

Geiger holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Kansas.

Apostolos Gerasoulis
Executive Vice President, Search Technology

As executive vice president of search technology for Ask.com, Apostolos Gerasoulis oversees Ask.com's search organization and search products.

Prior to Ask.com, Gerasoulis co-founded Teoma Technologies, Inc., an algorithmic search engine company. He served as Teoma's CTO, then as CEO, until the company was acquired by Ask.com in 2001. The integration of Teoma's algorithmic search technology into Ask.com was a critical component to ensuring the leading search engine continued to deliver world-class search products in an increasingly competitive sector.

Gerasoulis holds a Ph.D. from State University New York, Stony Brook and has been a Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University since 1979.

Tomasz Imielinski
Senior Vice President, Search Technology

As senior vice president of search technology, Dr. Tomasz Imielinski is responsible for the algorithmic search technologies that power Ask.com Web Search as well as key vertical search services, such as Image, News, and Blog Search. These core search technologies, including Ask.com's heralded algorithm ExpertRank, mine and rank structured and unstructured data from across the Web. Imielinski also oversees many application-level features of Ask.com such as Zoom Related Search, a popular feature that offers conceptually related suggestions to help searchers easily narrow or expand their search queries. Imielinski joined Ask.com in 2004 as vice president of data solutions and was promoted to his current position in 2006.

Currently on leave, Imielinski has been a professor at Rutgers University since 1983. In addition, from 1996 until 2003, he served as chairman of the university's Computer Science department. Prior to joining Ask.com, Imielinski co-founded Connotate Technologies, Inc., a leader in data extraction from the Web and Enterprise.

Imielinski holds numerous patents, has published nearly 100 scientific papers and authored two books. In 1991, he co-invented the concept of "association rule mining", which has become one of the key data mining techniques included in every major commercial database application. His paper on the subject is one of twenty most-cited papers in all computer science literature.

In addition, Imielinski received the "Most Influential Paper" award in 2002 from the Very Large Data Bases Conference. For his work on mobile computing, he received the "Test of Time" award in 2003 from the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) interest group in data management (SIGMOD). This prestigious award recognizes the paper highlighted in the SIGMOD proceedings 10 years prior, which in turn has had the most impact over the intervening decade.

Imielinski holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Polish Academy of Science and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Poland's Politechnic of Gdansk.

Doug Leeds
Senior Vice President of Product Management

As senior vice president of product management for Ask.com, Doug Leeds oversees Ask.com's global search products, including web and vertical search services. Doug also manages Ask.com's Bloglines group.

Prior to joining Ask.com, Leeds spent close to five years at Yahoo! (including Overture Services), most recently as vice president, Global Product Justice, where he led the development of reputational products and services as well as oversaw product policy and legal compliance for all of Yahoo!'s products and services worldwide.

Earlier in his career, Leeds held senior positions at mobile ISP OmniSky and mobile carrier Vodafone, and founded BootSpace, an advertising software start-up.

Leeds received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.

Mary Osako
Senior Vice President, Worldwide Communications

As senior vice president of worldwide corporate communications for Ask.com, Mary Osako is responsible for global communications efforts for the company.

Osako previously served as vice president of corporate communications for Yahoo!, where she most recently oversaw the firm's International and Global Policy Communications group. Prior to that role, Osako oversaw communications for Yahoo!'s Broadband, Mobile, Personals, Communications Products and Online Community initiatives, as well as for Yahoo!'s crisis communications group. Prior to Yahoo!, Osako served in key communications roles at Sprint Corp., All Nippon Airways, and worked with a diverse range of brands, including as The Walt Disney Company and SunAmerica Financial Services.

Osako received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Asian American Studies from U.C.L.A.

Daniel Read
Senior Vice President of Product Management and User Experience

As senior vice president of product and user experience at Ask.com, Daniel Read oversees user experience, product architecture, new product development and user interface design and strategy.

Read was formerly product director for Ask.com U.K. Prior to that, Read developed and designed web properties, ecommerce services, online customer support and marketing operations for British Airways. Prior to British Airways, Read was a founding member of the Internet Management Board for Royal Mail, where he designed many of the post office group's original web properties and information systems.

Read has developed over 100 products and features across major web properties, which include ask.com, ask.co.uk, ba.com, britishairways.co.uk, royalmail.com and postoffice.co.uk.

Read is a chartered marketer and holds an honors degree in business and a master's degree in design.

Mark Stockford
Senior Vice President of Operations

As senior vice president of operations at Ask.com, Mark Stockford provides strategic and tactical planning for Ask.com's technology and engineering department and oversees development, evaluation and coordination for Ask.com's data center operations.

Before joining Ask.com, Stockford served as senior director of network and data center services at eBay, Inc. In this role, Stockford was responsible for the design, implementation and support services of network and security engineering for eBay.com's world wide IT operations. Stockford was also responsible for eBay's international data center operations and oversight of the company's China Operations Center. Prior to eBay, Stockford held multiple positions with Excite@Home, including acting vice president of network engineering and senior director of network engineering. Stockford has also held positions with Stanford Health Services and UCSF Stanford.

Stockford received his B.S. in Business Administration from California Sate University, San Jose.

Tao Yang
Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist

As senior vice president and chief scientist at Ask.com, Tao Yang oversees global development and growth management of Ask.com's search technologies, with a special focus on large-scale system infrastructure, data management and classification technologies.

Yang was Chief Scientist and vice president of engineering from 2003 to 2005 for search development, and was chief scientist and vice president of R&D for Teoma Technologies from 2000 to 2001. Yang has been directly responsible for scaling search architectures and algorithms to handle billions of documents, and has co-developed large portions of company's online and offline systems for search. Yang is a co-inventor of the ExpertRank (formally Teoma) algorithm and other relevancy and classification algorithms.

Yang was also a full professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an author of over 90 research papers and patents on parallel and distributed systems, Internet services and search, and sparse matrix computation. Yang received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 1997.

Yang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University and his B.S. in Computer Science from Zhejiang University in China.