Oren Etzioni, born in 1964, is a retired professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He founded the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and served as its first chief executive officer. Etzioni also co-founded Vercept, an artificial intelligence company, and founded TrueMedia.org, a non-profit organization that works to stop political deepfakes. TrueMedia.org began operations in April 2024. Additionally, he is the founder and technical director of the AI2 Incubator and a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.

Early life and education

Etzioni is the son of Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli-American scholar. He was the first student to major in computer science at Harvard University. He earned a bachelor's degree there in 1986. He earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in January 1991. His advisor was Tom M. Mitchell.

University of Washington career

Etzioni became a professor at the University of Washington in 1991, right after earning his PhD. He advanced in his career and later held the title of Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in Computer Science & Engineering.

Etzioni’s research focuses on fundamental questions about intelligence, machine reading, machine learning, and searching the web. Earlier projects included Internet Softbots, which studied how smart computer programs function in real-world software environments. In 2003, he began the KnowItAll project to gather large amounts of information from the web. In 2005, he started and led the university’s Turing Center. The center studied issues related to data mining, understanding human language, the Semantic Web, and other web search areas. Etzioni created the term "machine reading" and helped develop the first widely used tool that compares prices online. He has written more than 200 scientific articles, and his H-index exceeds 100.

Entrepreneurship

As a teacher and researcher, Etzioni was also an active entrepreneur. He started several companies and developed many technologies. These include MetaCrawler, which was bought by Infospace; Netbot, which was purchased by Excite in 1997 for $35 million; and ClearForest, which was acquired by Reuters. He also founded Farecast, a website that helps people find travel deals and predict prices. Microsoft bought Farecast in 2008 for $115 million. Before starting Farecast, Etzioni created a program called Hamlet. This program used special computer methods to find patterns in airfare prices.

He also helped start Decide.com, a website that helps people decide what to buy by showing past prices and user recommendations. eBay bought Decide.com in September 2013. Etzioni is currently a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group, which supports new technology companies.

He is the founder and leader of TrueMedia.org, a non-profit organization that works to stop fake political videos. TrueMedia.org began in April 2024. Etzioni is also a co-founder of Vercept, an artificial intelligence company started in 2025.

Founding CEO of AI2

In September 2013, Etzioni was chosen as the first chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Paul G. Allen, a donor who provided funding for the institute. In January 2014, he took a break from his job at the University of Washington to work in this role.

Etzioni continued to contribute to AI research at AI2. For example, in 2015, he helped develop the Semantic Scholar search engine. Under his leadership, AI2 increased from zero to more than 200 team members, including well-known scientists and engineers working in many areas of artificial intelligence. By 2021, AI2 researchers had published nearly 700 papers in journals such as AAAI, ACL, CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICLR. Twenty-four of these papers received special recognition awards. AI2 also provided important tools and resources to the artificial intelligence community, such as the AllenNLP library, Semantic Scholar, and the conservation platforms EarthRanger and Skylight.

Ed Lazowska, a member of AI2’s board, said about Etzioni that he "used the teamwork and cooperation he learned during his more than 20 years as a professor at the University of Washington’s Allen School and combined it with the strong focus seen in startups to create a special mix. This mix has helped AI2 achieve great success over the past eight years. The result is a highly successful organization of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs working to achieve Paul Allen’s goal of ‘AI for the Common Good.’"

Popular press

In addition to his scientific papers, Etzioni has written articles about AI for The New York Times, Wired, Nature, and other publications. After reading a book about AI written by Brad Smith and Harry Shum, Etzioni tried to create an oath for AI practitioners. In 2018, he wrote an article titled "Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners" in TechCrunch.

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.
• In 2022, Etzioni received the 2012 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award.
• 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."

Personal life

Etzioni has three children and has stated in interviews that family is his top priority. He is currently married to Ivone Etzioni and was previously married to Dr. Ruth Etzioni, a scientist who works with data at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

In addition to his professional work, Etzioni has many personal interests. He has attended the Burning Man festival, which he said helps him try new things and feel more comfortable in different situations.

His first computer was a TRS-80. He has mentioned that his car’s GPS is his favorite gadget, and he joked that he doesn’t know directions well.

Selected 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