Philadelphia Speaker Series: Oren Etzioni Artificial Intelligence Pioneer

Artificial Intelligence pioneer, Oren Etzioni is the founder of TrueMedia.org – a non-profit technology organization using AI to create a non-partisan, free, and broadly accessible dashboard to combat political disinformation by identifying manipulated media and AI-based forgery of video, audio, images, and text across social media platforms.

Partnering with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Etzioni was the Founding Chief Executive Officer at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) from its inception in 2013 until late 2022 – one of the most highly respected AI research institutes in the world, whose mission is AI for the Common Good. Under his leadership, AI2 pursued ambitious projects aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in AI and addressing extraordinary scientific, engineering, and societal challenges.

Etzioni joined the Computer Science faculty at the University of Washington in 1991, founded and directed the University’s Turing Center, and continues to teach as Professor Emeritus. His research helped create powerful technologies including meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and open information extraction.   

An award-winning author, Etzioni has published more than 200 technical papers, and received prestigious Test of Time Awards for two of his papers.

He has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wired, and Nature, and advised the White House on AI.

The first person to “major” in Computer Science at Harvard University, Etzioni received his BA from Harvard in 1986, and earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. He is a technical director of the AI2 Incubator and a Venture Partner at Madrona. He has founded or co-founded several AI companies including Farecast (acquired by Microsoft) and Decide.com (acquired by eBay). These ventures focused on leveraging AI and data analytics to provide consumers with valuable insights and decision-making tools.