Oren Etzioni | |
---|---|
Born | 1964 (age 59–60) New York, New York, U.S. |
Alma mater | Harvard University (BA 1986) Carnegie Mellon University (PhD 1991) |
Awards | AAAI Fellow (2003) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science |
Institutions | Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence University of Washington |
Doctoral advisor | Tom M. Mitchell |
Oren Etzioni (born 1964) [1] is an American entrepreneur, Professor Emeritus of computer science, and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). [2] [3] [4] [5] On June 15, 2022, he announced that he will step down as CEO of AI2 effective September 30, 2022. After that time, he will continue as a board member and advisor. Etzioni will also take the position of Technical Director of the AI2 Incubator.
Etzioni is the son of Israeli-American intellectual Amitai Etzioni. [6] 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. [7]
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. [7] 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. [7] In 2005, he founded and became the director of the university's Turing Center. [7] The center investigated problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics. [8] Etzioni coined the term machine reading [9] and helped to create the first commercial comparison shopping agent. He has published over 200 technical papers.
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. [10] [11] 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. [12] Etzioni is also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group. [13]
In September 2013 Etzioni was selected as the Founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, [14] 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. [15]
In addition to his scientific publications, Etzioni has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Wired , [16] 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. [17] [18]
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ignored (help)Paul Gardner Allen was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, film producer, and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding Microsoft Corporation with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which helped spark the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Allen was ranked as the 44th-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes in 2018, with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence, including the idea that there might not be a "fire alarm" for AI. He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957). He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
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Daniel Sabey Weld is an American computer scientist who is the Thomas J. Cable/WRF Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he does research in automated planning and scheduling, software agents, and Internet information extraction. He is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle-based venture capital firm.
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Sivaramakichenane Somasegar is an Indian-American technology business executive in the Greater Seattle Area. He is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital firm based in Seattle. Somasegar joined Madrona in November 2015 after a 27-year career at Microsoft, where he most recently was corporate vice president of the developer division and overseeing the global distributed R&D centers at Microsoft.
MetaCrawler is a search engine. It is a registered trademark of InfoSpace and was created by Erik Selberg.
Netbot was the first commercial Internet price comparison service. Founded by University of Washington Computer Science professors Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. Weld the company was funded by ARCH Venture Partners, Alta Partners and the Madrona Venture Group, and the University of Washington was also a shareholder. Netbot introduced the Jango comparison shopping “agent” first as a browser plug-in and later as a server product. In addition, the company operated MetaCrawler, a metasearch engine, before licensing it to Go2Net. In October 1997, Netbot was acquired by the Excite portal for $35M.
The Allen Institute for AI is a 501(c)3 non-profit research institute founded by late Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen in 2014. The institute seeks to conduct high-impact AI research and engineering in service of the common good. Oren Etzioni was appointed by Paul Allen in September 2013 to direct the research at the institute. After leading the organization for nine years, Oren Etzioni stepped down from his role as CEO on September 30, 2022. He was replaced in an interim capacity by the leading researcher of the company's Aristo project, Peter Clark. On June 20, 2023, AI2 announced Ali Farhadi as its next CEO starting July 31, 2023. The company's board formed a search committee for a new CEO. AI2 also has an active office in Tel Aviv, Israel.
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