Oren is currently the CTO, Co founder with Decide.com, leveraging his big data knowledge he has honed with Farecast. Farecast was sold to Microsoft in 2008 after he started it in 2004. He is also a Venture Partner with Madrona and founder or co founder of various startups in the Seattle area. He chairs Madrona’s Technology Advisory Board and is a Professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering. He is the author of more than 100 academic papers on topics including Web search, data mining, agent technology, and various aspects of Artificial Intelligence. He was the Chief Technology Officer and board member of Go2Net Inc. (acquired by InfoSpace) and a founder of Netbot, Inc. (acquired by Excite). He received the NSF Young Investigator Award, was chosen to be an AAAI Fellow, and in 2007 received the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award for “long-standing technical and entrepreneurial contributions to Artificial Intelligence”.
At Netbot, Dr. Etzioni helped to conceive and design the web’s first major comparison-shopping agent. In 1995, he and his student Erik Selberg developed MetaCrawler, the Web’s premier Meta-search engine for several years. He also is a co-founder of Clearforest (acquired by Reuters).
He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from Harvard University, and his MS and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.