Biography:Oren Etzioni

From HandWiki
Oren Etzioni
Born1964 (age 61–62)
New York, New York, U.S.
Alma materHarvard University (BA 1986)
Carnegie Mellon University (PhD 1991)
AwardsAAAI Fellow (2003)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsAllen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
University of Washington
Doctoral advisorTom M. Mitchell

Oren Etzioni (born 1964)[1] is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington, and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).[2][3][4][5] Etzioni is a co-founder of Vercept, an AI startup,[6] and founder and CEO of TrueMedia.org, a non-profit dedicated to fighting political deepfakes, which launched in April 2024.[7] He is also the Founder and Technical Director of the AI2 Incubator[8] and a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.[9]

Early life and education

Etzioni is the son of Israeli-American intellectual Amitai Etzioni.[10] He was the first student to major in computer science at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1986. He earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in January, 1991, supervised by Tom M. Mitchell.[11]

University of Washington career

Etzioni joined the University of Washington faculty in 1991, immediately after receiving his PhD. He rose through the ranks to become the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in Computer Science & Engineering.

Etzioni's research has been focused on basic problems in the study of intelligence, machine reading, machine learning and web search.[11] Past projects include Internet Softbots—the study of intelligent agents in the context of real-world software testbeds. In 2003, he started the KnowItAll project for acquiring massive amounts of information from the web.[11] In 2005, he founded and became the director of the university's Turing Center.[11] The center investigated problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics.[12] Etzioni coined the term machine reading[13] and helped to create the first commercial comparison shopping agent. He has published over 200 technical papers, and his H-index exceeds 100.[14]

Entrepreneurship

As a faculty member Etzioni was also an active entrepreneur, founding multiple companies and pioneering multiple technologies including MetaCrawler (bought by Infospace), Netbot (bought by Excite in 1997 for $35 million), and ClearForest (bought by Reuters). He founded Farecast, a travel metasearch and price prediction site, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $115 million.[15][16] Before founding Farecast, he developed a program originally called Hamlet, that used algorithms to identify patterns in airfare data using data-mining techniques.[17]

He also co-founded Decide.com, a website to help consumers make buying decisions using previous price history and recommendations from other users. Decide.com was bought by eBay in September, 2013.[18] Etzioni is also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.[9]

He is founder and CEO of TrueMedia.org, a non-profit dedicated to fighting political deepfakes, which launched in April 2024.[7]

Etzioni is a co-founder of Vercept, an AI startup formed in 2025.[6]

Founding CEO of AI2

In September 2013 Etzioni was selected as the Founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence by philanthropist Paul G. Allen,[19] and in January 2014 he took a leave of absence from the University of Washington to serve in that role.

Etzioni's technical contributions continued at AI2; for example, in 2015, he helped to create the Semantic Scholar search engine.[20] Under Etzioni’s leadership, AI2 grew from zero to over two hundred team members including notable researchers and engineers across several domains of AI. By 2021, its AI2 researchers had published near 700 papers in publications such as AAAI, ACL, CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICLR. Twenty-four of these papers had garnered special-recognition awards. AI2 also offered several key resources and tools to the AI community including the AllenNLP library, Semantic Scholar, and the conservation platforms EarthRanger and Skylight.

Ed Lazowska, AI2 Board Member, has stated about Etzioni that he "took the collegial, collaborative culture that he absorbed in his 20+ years as a professor in UW's Allen School and mixed it with the singular focus that drives startups to create an elixir that AI2 folks have been drinking over the last eight years. The result is an exceptional organization of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs that's pursuing Paul Allen’s vision of ‘AI for the Common Good’ with extraordinary success.”

In addition to his scientific publications, Etzioni has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Wired,[21] Nature, and other publications.

After reading the idea in a book about AI by Brad Smith and Harry Shum, Etzioni has attempted to create an oath for AI practitioners.[22][23] In 2018, he published what he called a "Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners" in TechCrunch.[24]

Awards and recognition

  • In 1993, Etzioni received a National Young Investigator Award.[11]
  • In 2003, Etzioni was elected as AAAI Fellow.[11]
  • In 2005, Etzioni received an IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award for "A Probabilistic Model of Redundancy in Information Extraction".[11]
  • In 2007, he received the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award.[11]
  • In 2012 Etzioni was featured as GeekWire's "Geek of the Week".[25]
  • In 2013 Etzioni was voted "Geek of the Year" through GeekWire.[26]
  • In 2022, Etzioni received the 2012 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award.[27]
  • In 2022, Etzioni, along with Ana-Maria Popescu and Henry Kautz, received the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces Most Impact Award for their 2003 paper, "Towards a Theory of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases".[28]

Personal life

Etzioni has three children, and has said in interviews that family is his number one priority.[29] He is married to Ivone Etzioni, and was previously married to Dr. Ruth Etzioni, a biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.[30]

Outside of his professional career, Etzioni has a wide range of personal interests. He has attended the Burning Man festival, which he described as a valuable way to step outside his comfort zone.[31]

His first computer was a TRS-80, and he has described his car’s GPS as his favorite gadget, joking that he has “no sense of direction.”[32]

Selected publications

Scholarly publications

References

  1. ↑ "He does what he wanted to do when he grew up (kind of) – The Washington Jewish Museum". 7 August 2018. https://www.washingtonjewishmuseum.org/he-does-what-he-wanted-to-do-when-he-grew-up-kind-of/. 
  2. ↑ "Team — Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence". http://allenai.org/team.html. 
  3. ↑ Romano, Benjamin (September 4, 2013). "Paul Allen Hires Oren Etzioni for New Artificial Intelligence Push". Xconomy. http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2013/09/04/paul-allen-hires-oren-etzioni-new-artificial-intelligence-push/. 
  4. ↑ "UW Professor Oren Etzioni To Lead Paul Allen's New Artificial Intelligence Institute". KUOW. http://kuow.org/post/uw-professor-oren-etzioni-lead-paul-allens-new-artificial-intelligence-institute. 
  5. ↑ "Deep Learning And Artifical [sic] Intelligence" (in en-US). http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-03-30/deep-learning-and-artifical-intelligence. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Bishop, Todd (2025-02-10). "Ex-Allen Institute for AI scientists form stealthy AI startup, with former Ai2 CEO Oren Etzioni" (in en-US). https://www.geekwire.com/2025/ex-allen-institute-for-ai-scientists-form-stealthy-ai-startup-with-former-ai2-ceo-oren-etzioni/. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Metz, C. (2024, April 2). An AI researcher takes on election deepfakes. The New York Times
  8. ↑ "AI2 Incubator" (in en). https://ai2incubator.com/. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "oren etzioni: Venture Partner". Madrona.com. Madrona Venture Group. http://www.madrona.com/venture-capital-team/team-members.asp?name=Oren-Etzioni&member=9. 
  10. ↑ Why Stereo Systems Won't Turn into the Death Star, by Uri Pasovsky. CTech. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3740813,00.html
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 "Oren Etzioni". University of Washington. http://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/etzioni/. 
  12. ↑ "Turing Center at University of Washington". University of Washington. http://turing.cs.washington.edu/. 
  13. ↑ Etzioni, Oren; Banko, Michelle; Carafella, Michael (2006). "Machine Reading". AAAI: 1517–1519. http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2007/SS-07-06/SS07-06-001.pdf. 
  14. ↑ "Oren Etzioni". https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EXU4zxcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao. 
  15. ↑ Peter High, June 6, 2016 The Serial Entrepreneur Who Leads Paul Allen's AI Institute, Forbes
  16. ↑ Wingfield, Nick (November 18, 2013), "Start-Up Leaders Recall Choice to Cash In or Stay Independent", The New York Times, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/11/18/technology/startup-leaders-weigh-decision-to-sell.html, retrieved March 27, 2021 
  17. ↑ Demerjian, Dave (August 18, 2006), Casting Net for Better Airfares, Wired, https://www.wired.com/2006/08/casting-net-for-better-airfares/, retrieved July 8, 2025 
  18. ↑ "eBay acquires Decide.com, shopping research site will shut down Sept. 30" (in en-US). 2013-09-06. https://www.geekwire.com/2013/ebay-acquires-decidecom-shopping-research-site-shut-sept-30/. 
  19. ↑ "Paul G. Allen Appoints Head of Artificial Intelligence Institute". PR Newswire. September 4, 2013. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/paul-g-allen-appoints-head-of-artificial-intelligence-institute-222346711.html. 
  20. ↑ Nicola Jones, November 11, 2016 AI science search engines expand their reach, Nature
  21. ↑ Oren Etzioni, Wired
  22. ↑ Khari Johnson, March 23, 2018, AI Weekly: For the sake of us all, AI practitioners need a Hippocratic oath, VentureBeat
  23. ↑ Catherine Clifford, March 14, 2018, Expert says graduates in A.I. should take oath: ‘I must not play at God nor let my technology do so’, CNBC
  24. ↑ Etzioni, Oren (March 14, 2018), A Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners, TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/14/a-hippocratic-oath-for-artificial-intelligence-practitioners/, retrieved July 8, 2025 
  25. ↑ Bishop, Todd (January 19, 2012). "Geek of the Week: Oren Etzioni on Siri, Burning Man and the promise of algorithms". GeekWire. http://www.geekwire.com/2012/geek-of-the-week-oren-etzioni/. 
  26. ↑ Soper, Taylor (May 9, 2013). "Revealed: The winners of the 2013 GeekWire Awards". GeekWire. http://www.geekwire.com/2013/revealed-winners-2013-geekwire-awards/. 
  27. ↑ "Announcement of the 2022 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award | ACL Member Portal". https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2022-acl-test-time-paper-award. 
  28. ↑ "Steering Committee - ACM Intelligent User Interfaces" (in en). https://iui.acm.org/steering/. 
  29. ↑ "Q&A with Oren Etzioni". https://comotion.uw.edu/about/news/qa-with-oren-etzioni/. 
  30. ↑ "2011 Annual Report Donors". 2011. https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/annual-reports/2011/donors.html. 
  31. ↑ "Q&A with Oren Etzioni". https://comotion.uw.edu/about/news/qa-with-oren-etzioni/. 
  32. ↑ "Q&A with Oren Etzioni". https://comotion.uw.edu/about/news/qa-with-oren-etzioni/. 

Further reading



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