Oren Etzioni

Oren Etzioni is an American entrepreneur and professor 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 investigates problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics. He coined the term machine reading and he created the first commercial comparison shopping agent.

Etzioni 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.

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.

Etzioni is an entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded several business ventures, including MetaCrawler (bought by Infospace), Netbot (bought by Excite), and ClearForest (bought by Reuters). He founded Farecast, a travel metasearch and price prediction site, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. He co-founded Decide, a company whose website Decide.com helped consumers make buying decisions using previous price history and recommendations from other users. Decide.com was bought by eBay in September, 2013. He is also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.

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 January 2012, Etzioni was featured as GeekWire's "Geek of the Week".

In May 2013 Etzioni was voted "Geek of the Year" through GeekWire.

In September 2013, Business Insider called Etzioni "the most successful entrepreneur you've never heard of."

• Zamir, Oren; Etzioni, Oren (1998). "Web document clustering: a feasibility demonstration". SIGIR '98 Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. ACM: 46–54. doi:10.1145/290941.290956. ISBN 1-58113-015-5. 
• Zamir, Oren; Etzioni, Oren (May 1999). "Grouper: a dynamic clustering interface to Web search results". Computer Networks. Elsevier. 31 (11-16): 1361–1374. doi:10.1016/S1389-1286(99)00054-7. 
• Popescu, Ana-Maria; Etzioni, Oren (2005). "Extracting product features and opinions from reviews". HLT '05 Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. ACM: 339–346. doi:10.3115/1220575.1220618.