Oren Etzioni

Etzioni is the son of Israeli-American intellectual Amitai Etzioni. He 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.

Academic career

Etzioni joined the University of Washington faculty in 1991, immediately after receiving his PhD. He eventually became the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in Computer Science & Engineering.

Etzioni's research has 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.

In 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. He has published over 200 technical papers, and his H-index exceeds 100.

As a faculty member at the University of Washington, Etzioni founded multiple companies, including MetaCrawler (bought by Infospace), Netbot (bought by Excite in 1997 for $35 million), and ClearForest (bought by Reuters). He founded Farecast, a travel metasearch and price prediction site, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $115 million. Before founding Farecast, he developed a program (originally called Hamlet) that used algorithms to identify patterns in airfare data using data-mining techniques.

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 founded and led TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit that operated an online service for detecting political deepfakes; in January 2025, it announced that it would shut down the service and release its technology as open source.

He co-founded Vercept, an AI startup acquired by Anthropic in February 2026.

Etzioni has three children. He is married to Ivone Etzioni, and was previously married to Dr. Ruth Etzioni, a biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

Etzioni has attended the Burning Man festival, which he described as a valuable way to step outside his comfort zone.

His first computer was a TRS-80, and he has described his car's GPS as his favorite gadget, joking that he has "no sense of direction."