Professor Oren Etzioni

Oren Etzioni received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvard University in June 1986 where he was the first Harvard student to "major" in Computer Science.   Etzioni received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in January 1991, and joined the University of Washington's faculty in February 1991, where he is now a Professor of Computer Science.    Etzioni received a National Young Investigator Award in 1993, and was selected as a AAAI Fellow a decade later.  In 2007, he received the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award.  He is the founder and director of the University of Washington's Turing Center.

Etzioni is the author of over 100 technical papers in a wide range of conferences including AAAI, ACL, CIDR, COLING, EMNLP, FOCS, HLT,  ICML, IJCAI, ISWC, IUI, KDD, KR, SIGIR, and WWW.  He is a founder of three companies (see below) and a Venture Partner at the Madrona Venture Group.   His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, SCIENCE, The Economist, TIME Magazine, Business Week, Newsweek, Discover Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Wired, NBC Nightly News, and even Pravda.

His current research interests include:  fundemental problems in the study of intelligence,  Web search, Machine Reading, and Machine Learning.

Etzioni is the founder of Farecast---a company that utilizes data mining techniques to anticipate airfare fluctuations.  The company was formerly known as Hamlet ("to buy or not to buy...that is the question").  Farecast was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.  He was the Chief Technology Officer and a board member of Go2net (acquired by Infospace in 2000), and a co-founder of Netbot. (acquired by Excite in 1997). At Netbot, Etzioni helped to conceive and design the web's first major comparison-shopping agent. In 1995, Etzioni and his student Erik Selberg developed MetaCrawler, the web’s premier Meta-search engine for several years – now being run by Infospace.  He is a co-founder of Clearforest, a text-mining startup (acquired by Reuters in 2007), and has served on the board of Performant (acquired by Mercury Interactive in 2003).  Finally, Etzioni has served as a consultant or advisor to Google, Microsoft, Northern Telecom, SAIC, Infospace, Excite, Askjeeves, Zillow, Vivisimo, and others.

In 1991, Etzioni launched the Internet Softbots project, and in 2003 he launched the KnowItAll project.
You have to wonder what he was doing in the intervening 12 years...

In 1997, Etzioni's joint paper on the Ahoy! Softbot was the runner-up for best paper award in WWW6, alas the award itself was snagged by Alta Vista.
In 2004, his joint paper on Semantic Email was a runner-up for the best paper award in WWW13...
An actual award is coming any day now...really...wait...A Probabilistic Model of Redundancy in Information Extraction snagged the
Distinguished Paper Award at IJCAI 2005.