Oren Etzioni
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 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
[edit]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
[edit]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
[edit]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
[edit]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]
Popular press
[edit]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
[edit]- 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
[edit]Scholarly publications
[edit]- 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.
Popular articles
[edit]- Etzioni, Oren (August 4, 2011). "Web Search Needs a Shakeup" (PDF). Nature. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (December 9, 2014). "AI Won't Exterminate Us – It Will Empower Us". Backchannel. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
- Etzioni, Oren (February 4, 2016). "To Keep AI Safe -- Use AI". Vox. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (April 8, 2016). "Quora Session with Oren Etzioni". Quora. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
- Etzioni, Oren (June 15, 2016). "Deep Learning Isn't a Dangerous Magic Genie. It's Just Math". Wired. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
- Etzioni, Oren (September 20, 2016). "No, the Experts Don't Think Superintelligent AI is a Threat to Humanity". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (July 6, 2017). "Artificial intelligence: AI Zooms in on highly influential citations". Nature. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
- Etzioni, Oren (September 1, 2017). "How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence". The New York Times. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
- Etzioni, Oren (November 2, 2017). "Workers Displaced by Automation Should Try A New Job: Caregiver". Wired. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
- Etzioni, Oren (March 14, 2018). "A Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners". Tech Crunch. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
- Etzioni, Oren (March 7, 2018). "A 'Manhattan Project' for science research". The Hill. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (December 2018). "Point: Should AI Technology Be Regulated?: Yes, and Here's How". CACM. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (February 13, 2019). "What Trump's Executive Order on AI Is Missing". Wired. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (March 1, 2019). "How Will We Prevent AI-Based Forgery?". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (July 17, 2019). "We have the basis for an international AI treaty". The Hill. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (July 18, 2019). "High-Stakes AI Decisions Need to Be Automatically Audited". Wired. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (October 18, 2019). "Analysis: Seattle startup ecosystem poised for unprecedented acceleration of company creation". GeekWire. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (October 18, 2019). "AI Academy Under Siege". Inside HigherEd. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
- Etzioni, Oren (February 25, 2020). "How to know if artificial intelligence is about to destroy civilization". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
- Etzioni, Oren (March 28, 2020). "AI Can Help Scientists Find a Covid-19 Vaccine". Wired. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
References
[edit]- ^ "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.
- ^ "Team — Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence". allenai.org. Retrieved March 22, 2016.
- ^ Romano, Benjamin (September 4, 2013). "Paul Allen Hires Oren Etzioni for New Artificial Intelligence Push". Xconomy. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
- ^ "UW Professor Oren Etzioni To Lead Paul Allen's New Artificial Intelligence Institute". KUOW. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
- ^ "Deep Learning And Artifical [sic] Intelligence". The Diane Rehm Show. Retrieved April 5, 2016.
- ^ Metz, C. (2024, April 2). An AI researcher takes on election deepfakes. The New York Times
- ^ a b "oren etzioni: Venture Partner". Madrona.com. Madrona Venture Group. Retrieved February 24, 2013.
- ^ 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
- ^ a b c d e f g h "Oren Etzioni". University of Washington. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
- ^ "Turing Center at University of Washington". University of Washington. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
- ^ Etzioni, Oren; Banko, Michelle; Carafella, Michael (2006). "Machine Reading" (PDF). AAAI: 1517–1519.
- ^ Peter High, June 6, 2016 The Serial Entrepreneur Who Leads Paul Allen's AI Institute, Forbes
- ^ Wingfield, Nick (November 18, 2013), "Start-Up Leaders Recall Choice to Cash In or Stay Independent", The New York Times, retrieved March 27, 2021
- ^ "eBay acquires Decide.com, shopping research site will shut down Sept. 30". GeekWire. September 6, 2013. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ "Paul G. Allen Appoints Head of Artificial Intelligence Institute". PR Newswire. September 4, 2013. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
- ^ Nicola Jones, November 11, 2016 AI science search engines expand their reach, Nature
- ^ Oren Etzioni, Wired
- ^ Khari Johnson, March 23, 2018, AI Weekly: For the sake of us all, AI practitioners need a Hippocratic oath, VentureBeat
- ^ 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
- ^ 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.
- ^ Soper, Taylor (May 9, 2013). "Revealed: The winners of the 2013 GeekWire Awards". GeekWire. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
Further reading
[edit]- Clifford, Stephanie (November 24, 2011). "Friday's Deals May Not Be the Best". The New York Times. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
- Lohr, Steve (August 4, 2011). "A Call to Rethink Internet Search". Bits. The New York Times. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
- Sivitz, Larry (October 15, 2005). "UW Professor Oren Etzioni, inventor of Metacrawler, NetBot, and now Hamlet, is a Virtual PhD of Webology". Seattle 24x7. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
- Tompa, Rachel (February 19, 2009). "UW Computer Scientist Oren Etzioni on Startups, Venture Capital, and the Future of Web Search". Xconomy. Retrieved February 24, 2013.
- Wingfield, Nick (July 7, 2012). "A Northwest Pipeline to Silicon Valley". The New York Times. Retrieved February 23, 2013.
External links
[edit]- Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Page
- University of Washington faculty profile
- Oren Etzioni - The Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Video:Artificial Intelligence Drives Oren Etzioni's Passion on YouTube, Microsoft Research
- Profile at Allen Institute for AI
- 1964 births
- Living people
- American chief executives
- American computer businesspeople
- American computer scientists
- American artificial intelligence researchers
- Businesspeople from Seattle
- Carnegie Mellon University alumni
- Data miners
- Harvard University alumni
- Machine learning researchers
- Natural language processing researchers
- Scientists from Seattle
- University of Washington faculty
- 21st-century American scientists
- 21st-century American businesspeople
- American people of Israeli descent
- American people of German-Jewish descent
- Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence