Abstract: In a world where Google, Facebook, and others possess massive proprietary data sets, and unprecedented computational power—how is a graduate student to make a dent in the universe? I’ll address this conundrum by re-visiting one of the holy grails of AI: acquiring, representing, and utilizing common-sense knowledge. Can we leverage modern methods including deep learning, NLP, and crowd sourcing to build AI systems that are more general, more robust to adversarial examples, and more data efficient than today’s AI savants?

Bio: 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 Seattle’s Geek of the Year (2013), the Robert Engelmore Memorial Award (2007), the IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award (2005), AAAI Fellow (2003), and a National Young Investigator Award (1993). He has been the founder or co-founder of several companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013). He has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Nature, Wired, and the MIT Technology Review. He helped to pioneer meta-search (1994), online comparison shopping (1996), machine reading (2006), and Open Information Extraction (2007). He has authored over 100 technical papers that have garnered over 1,800 highly influential citations on Semantic Scholar. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 and his B.A. from Harvard in 1986.

Homepage: http://allenai.org/team/orene/