Oren Etzioni

Oren Etzioni is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in the UW Computer Science Department where he also directs the Turing Center, a multidisciplinary research center investigating problems at the crossroads of natural language processing, data mining, Web search, and the Semantic Web. His research interests include fundamental problems in the study of intelligence, web search, machine reading, and machine learning. Oren founded the start-up company Farecast, which was acquired by Microsoft’s Bing Travel 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, Oren helped to conceive and design the web”s first major comparison-shopping agent. In 1995, Oren 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). Oren has served as a consultant or advisor to Google, Microsoft, Northern Telecom, SAIC, Infospace, Excite, Askjeeves, Zillow, Vivisimo, and others.