Episode 2: A Conversation with Oren Etzioni

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by Gigaom. Today, our guest is Oren Etzioni. He's a professor of computer science who founded and ran University of Washington's Turing Center. And since 2013, he's been the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Institute investigates problems in data mining, natural language processing, and the semantic web. And if all of that weren't enough to keep a person busy, he's also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group. Business Insider called him, quote: "The most successful entrepreneur you've never heard of." Welcome to the show, Oren. Oren Etzioni: Thank you, and thanks for the kind introduction. I think the key emphasis there would be, "you've never heard of." Well, I've heard of you, and I've followed your work and the Allen Institute's as well. And let's start, if that's Okay, let's start there. So if you would just start off by telling us a bit about the Allen Institute, and then I would love to go through the four projects that you feature prominently on the website. And just talk about each one; they're all really interesting. The Allen Institute for AI is really Paul Allen's brainchild. He's had a passion for AI for decades, and he's founded a series of institutes--scientific institutes--in Seattle, which were modeled after the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which has been very successful running since 2003. We were launched as a nonprofit on January 1, 2014, and it's a great honor to serve as CEO. Our mission is AI for the common good, and as you mentioned, we have four projects that I'm really excited about.