Dr. Oren Etzioni

Is Artificial Intelligence Good or Evil?

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Lecture Summary: Artificial Intelligence Expert Etzioni: To Harvest the True Potential of AI, Get Beyond Hype and Hysteria→

Transcript: View PDF Transcript→

ABSTRACT: Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) research result in threats to society, or will it yield beneficial technology? The talk will address these issues by describing the projects and perspective at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) in Seattle. AI2's mission is "AI for the Common Good," as exemplified by Semantic Scholar, a search engine that utilizes AI to overcome information overload in scientific search.

BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He has been a professor at the University of Washington's computer science department since 1991, receiving several awards, including GeekWire's Hire of the Year (2014), Seattle's Geek of the Year (2013), the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award (2007), the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Distinguished Paper Award (2005), election to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellows program (2003), and a National Science Foundation (NSF) National Young Investigator Award (1993). He is also the founder or co-founder of several companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013), and has authored more than 100 technical papers that have garnered more than 25,000 citations. The goal of Dr. Etzioni's research is to solve fundamental problems in AI, particularly the automatic learning of knowledge from text. Dr. Etzioni received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, and his B.A. from Harvard in 1986.