Oren Etzioni

Oren Etzioni
Born1964 (age 59–60)
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, and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).[2][3][4][5] Etzioni is the founder and CEO of TrueMedia.org, a non-profit dedicated to fighting political deepfakes, which launched in April 2024. [6] Etzioni is a Technical Director of the AI2 Incubator, and a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.[7]

Early life and education

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Etzioni is the son of Israeli-American intellectual Amitai Etzioni.[8] 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.[9]

University of Washington career

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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.[9] 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.[9] In 2005, he founded and became the director of the university's Turing Center.[9] The center investigated problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics.[10] Etzioni coined the term machine reading[11] and helped to create the first commercial comparison shopping agent. He has published over 200 technical papers.

Entrepreneurship

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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.[12][13] 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.[14] Etzioni is also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.[7]

AI2's Founding CEO

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In September 2013 Etzioni was selected as the Founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence,[15] 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.[16]

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In addition to his scientific publications, Etzioni has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Wired,[17] 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.[18][19]

Awards and recognition

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  • In 1993, Etzioni received a National Young Investigator Award.[9]
  • In 2003, Etzioni was elected as AAAI Fellow.[9]
  • In 2005, Etzioni received an IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award for "A Probabilistic Model of Redundancy in Information Extraction".[9]
  • In 2007, he received the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award.[9]
  • In 2012 Etzioni was featured as GeekWire's "Geek of the Week".[20]
  • In 2013 Etzioni was voted "Geek of the Year" through GeekWire.[21]

Selected publications

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Scholarly publications

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  • 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.
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References

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  1. ^ "He does what he wanted to do when he grew up (kind of) – The Washington Jewish Museum". August 7, 2018. Archived from the original on August 7, 2018. Retrieved February 15, 2019.
  2. ^ "Team — Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence". allenai.org. Retrieved March 22, 2016.
  3. ^ Romano, Benjamin (September 4, 2013). "Paul Allen Hires Oren Etzioni for New Artificial Intelligence Push". Xconomy. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
  4. ^ "UW Professor Oren Etzioni To Lead Paul Allen's New Artificial Intelligence Institute". KUOW. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
  5. ^ "Deep Learning And Artifical [sic] Intelligence". The Diane Rehm Show. Retrieved April 5, 2016.
  6. ^ Metz, C. (2024, April 2). An AI researcher takes on election deepfakes. The New York Times
  7. ^ a b "oren etzioni: Venture Partner". Madrona.com. Madrona Venture Group. Retrieved February 24, 2013.
  8. ^ 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
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h "Oren Etzioni". University of Washington. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
  10. ^ "Turing Center at University of Washington". University of Washington. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
  11. ^ Etzioni, Oren; Banko, Michelle; Carafella, Michael (2006). "Machine Reading" (PDF). AAAI: 1517–1519.
  12. ^ Peter High, June 6, 2016 The Serial Entrepreneur Who Leads Paul Allen's AI Institute, Forbes
  13. ^ Wingfield, Nick (November 18, 2013), "Start-Up Leaders Recall Choice to Cash In or Stay Independent", The New York Times, retrieved March 27, 2021
  14. ^ "eBay acquires Decide.com, shopping research site will shut down Sept. 30". GeekWire. September 6, 2013. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
  15. ^ "Paul G. Allen Appoints Head of Artificial Intelligence Institute". PR Newswire. September 4, 2013. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
  16. ^ Nicola Jones, November 11, 2016 AI science search engines expand their reach, Nature
  17. ^ Oren Etzioni, Wired
  18. ^ Khari Johnson, March 23, 2018, AI Weekly: For the sake of us all, AI practitioners need a Hippocratic oath, VentureBeat
  19. ^ 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
  20. ^ Bishop, Todd (January 19, 2012). "Geek of the Week: Oren Etzioni on Siri, Burning Man and the promise of algorithms". GeekWire. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
  21. ^ Soper, Taylor (May 9, 2013). "Revealed: The winners of the 2013 GeekWire Awards". GeekWire. Retrieved November 12, 2013.

Further reading

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