What I learned: stories and lessons from an academic lifetime

Speaker

TrueMedia.org, Allen Institute for AI

Host

Michael Cafarella
CSAIL
Abstract: In high school, I aspired to be a standup comic, but I walked into the wrong bar and ended up studying computer science. Over the last 40 years, I had some wild rides in both academia and outside of it, leading up to fighting political deepfakes at TrueMedia.org. I plan to share some amusing highlights with you as parables whose morals are broadly applicable.

Bio: Prof. Oren Etzioni is the founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit fighting political deepfakes. He was the Founding Chief Executive Officer at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), having served as CEO from its inception in 2013 until late 2022. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington where he helped to pioneer meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and open information extraction. He has authored several award-winning technical papers, achieving an H-index of 100 (100 technical papers each cited over 100 times). Finally, he is a technical director of the AI2 Incubator and a Venture Partner at Madrona. He has founded several companies including Farecast (acquired by Microsoft).