Owen received a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania, and he has worked at AT&T Labs — Research, 15 years at Columbia University as a research scientist, and three years at Elemental Cognition LLC, a startup aiming to develop software for deep language understanding. At Columbia, he was part of the Center for Computational Learning Systems. He was co-founder of CADIM, a research group on Arabic natural language processing (NLP), which is licensing state-of-the-art robust NLP tools.