# Oren Etzioni

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

## Early life and education

Etzioni is the son of Israeli-American intellectual Amitai Etzioni. 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.

## 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. 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. In 2005, he founded and became the director of the university's Turing Center. The center investigated problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics. Etzioni coined the term machine reading and helped to create the first commercial comparison shopping agent. He has published over 200 technical papers.

## 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. 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. Etzioni is also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.

## AI2's Founding CEO

In September 2013 Etzioni was selected as the Founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and in January 2014 he took a leave of absence from the University of Washington to serve in that role.
From inception, Etzioni partnered with late philanthropist Paul G. Allen to create one of the most highly respected AI research institutes in the world. Building on years of research, education, and startup experience, Etzioni developed an organizational culture that brought dedicated researchers from around the world together to conquer grand AI challenges followed by sharing products and resources openly with the world.
Under Etzioni’s leadership, AI2 grew from zero to over two hundred team members including world-class researchers and engineers across several domains of AI. Over the last eight years, AI2 researchers have published close to 700 papers in premier venues including AAAI, ACL, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, and more. Twenty-four of these papers have garnered special-recognition awards. AI2 offers several key resources and tools to the AI community including the AllenNLP library, Semantic Scholar, and the impactful conservation platforms EarthRanger and Skylight.
Ed Lazowska, AI2 Board Member and Professor/Bill & Melinda Gates Chair Emeritus at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, shared that “Oren 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.”
Etzioni's technical contributions continued at AI2; for example, in 2015, he helped to create the Semantic Scholar search engine.

## Popular press

In addition to his scientific publications, Etzioni has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Wired, 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.

## Awards and recognition

* In 1993, Etzioni received a National Young Investigator Award.
* In 2003, Etzioni was elected as AAAI Fellow.
* In 2005, Etzioni received an IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award for "A Probabilistic Model of Redundancy in Information Extraction".
* In 2007, he received the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award.
* In 2012 Etzioni was featured as GeekWire's "Geek of the Week".
* In 2013 Etzioni was voted "Geek of the Year" through GeekWire.

## Selected publications
### Scholarly publications

* Etzioni, Oren (July 1994). "A Softbot-based Interface to the Internet" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (December 2008). "Open Information Extraction from the Web" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Zamir, Oren; Etzioni, Oren (1998). "Web document clustering". Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. ACM. pp. 46–54. doi:10.1145/290941.290956. ISBN 978-1-58113-015-7. S2CID 244069.
* Zamir, Oren; Etzioni, Oren (May 1999). "Grouper: a dynamic clustering interface to Web search results". Computer Networks. 31 (11–16): 1361–1374. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.31.8216. doi:10.1016/S1389-1286(99)00054-7. S2CID 206134308.
* Popescu, Ana-Maria; Etzioni, Oren (2005). "Extracting product features and opinions from reviews". Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - HLT '05. pp. 339–346. doi:10.3115/1220575.1220618.
* Etzioni, Oren; Cafarella, Michael; Downey, Doug; Popescu, Ana-Maria; Shaked, Tal; Sonderland, Stephen; Weld, Daniel; Yates, Alexander (June 2005). "Unsupervised named-entity extraction from the Web: An experimental study". Artificial Intelligence. 165 (1): 91–134. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2005.03.001.
* Downey, Doug; Etzioni, Oren; Sonderland, Stephen (July 2010). "Grouper: Analysis of a probabilistic model of redundancy in unsupervised information extraction". Artificial Intelligence. 174 (11): 726–748. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.174.2441. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2010.04.024.

### Popular articles

* Etzioni, Oren (August 4, 2011). "Web Search Needs a Shakeup" (PDF). Nature. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (December 9, 2014). "AI Won't Exterminate Us – It Will Empower Us". Backchannel. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (February 4, 2016). "To Keep AI Safe -- Use AI". Vox. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (April 8, 2016). "Quora Session with Oren Etzioni". Quora. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (June 15, 2016). "Deep Learning Isn't a Dangerous Magic Genie. It's Just Math". Wired. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (September 20, 2016). "No, the Experts Don't Think Superintelligent AI is a Threat to Humanity". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (July 6, 2017). "Artificial intelligence: AI Zooms in on highly influential citations". Nature. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (September 1, 2017). "How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence". The New York Times. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (November 2, 2017). "Workers Displaced by Automation Should Try A New Job: Caregiver". Wired. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (March 14, 2018). "A Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners". Tech Crunch. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
* Etzioni, Oren (March 7, 2018). "A 'Manhattan Project' for science research". The Hill. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (December 2018). "Point: Should AI Technology Be Regulated?: Yes, and Here's How". CACM. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (February 13, 2019). "What Trump's Executive Order on AI Is Missing". Wired. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (March 1, 2019). "How Will We Prevent AI-Based Forgery?". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (July 17, 2019). "We have the basis for an international AI treaty". The Hill. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (July 18, 2019). "High-Stakes AI Decisions Need to Be Automatically Audited". Wired. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (October 18, 2019). "Analysis: Seattle startup ecosystem poised for unprecedented acceleration of company creation". GeekWire. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (October 18, 2019). "AI Academy Under Siege". Inside HigherEd. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
* Etzioni, Oren (February 25, 2020). "How to know if artificial intelligence is about to destroy civilization". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
* Etzioni, Oren (March 28, 2020). "AI Can Help Scientists Find a Covid-19 Vaccine". Wired. Retrieved March 28, 2020.