Oren Etzioni
Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington and founder of the AI2 Incubator
The founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, who coined "machine reading" and built several companies out of University of Washington research.
Biography
Oren Etzioni is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). He was the first student to major in computer science at Harvard University, graduating in 1986, and earned a PhD at Carnegie Mellon in 1991 under Tom Mitchell. He joined the University of Washington faculty that year.
His research has covered intelligent software agents, machine reading, machine learning and web search, and he coined the term machine reading. He has published over 200 papers with an h-index above 100. He founded or co-founded several companies, including MetaCrawler, Netbot, ClearForest, Farecast (acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $115 million) and Decide.com (acquired by eBay in 2013). In 2013 Paul Allen selected him as founding CEO of AI2, where he helped create the Semantic Scholar search engine. He also led TrueMedia.org, a deepfake detection nonprofit, and co-founded Vercept, which Anthropic acquired in February 2026.
Notable contributions
Founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI
Was selected in 2013 as founding CEO of AI2, the research institute created by Paul G. Allen.
Helped create Semantic Scholar
At AI2, helped create the Semantic Scholar academic search engine in 2015.
Founded Farecast, acquired by Microsoft
Founded the airfare price prediction site Farecast, which Microsoft acquired in 2008 for $115 million.
Ran TrueMedia.org
Founded and led TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit deepfake detection service, which in January 2025 announced it would shut down and release its technology as open source.