Oren Etzioni
Oren Etzioni (born 1964) is an American entrepreneur, professor emeritus of computer science, and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He joined the University of Washington faculty in 1991, where he became the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In May 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. 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. Research. Etzioni was appointed CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in September 2013. Etzioni's research is 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 2015, he helped to create the Semantic Scholar search engine. He has written for "Wired" about AI. 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. Business. Etzioni is an entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded several business ventures, 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.