In 2015, he helped to create the Semantic Scholar search engine.

Etzioni’s research is focused on basic problems in the study of intelligence, machine reading, machine learning and web search. 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.

Etzioni was appointed CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in September 2013.

Etzioni is an entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded several business ventures, including MetaCrawler (bought by Infospace), Netbot (bought by Excite), and ClearForest (bought by Reuters). He founded Farecast, a travel metasearch and price prediction site, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. 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. Etzioni is also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group.

Etzioni 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.

Oren Etzioni (born 1964) is an American entrepreneur, professor of computer science, and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He joined the University of Washington faculty in 1991, where he became the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In May 2005, he founded and became the director of the university’s Turing Center. The center investigated problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics. Etzioni coined the term machine reading and helped to create the first commercial comparison shopping agent.