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Janelle Shane

Artificial Intelligence Speaker, Humorist

Janelle Shane’s AI humor blog, AIweirdness.com, looks at the strange side of artificial intelligence. She has been featured on the main TED stage, in the New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Popular Science, All Things Considered, Science Friday, and Marketplace, as well as being the inaugural Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian. Her book, “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place” uses cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the algorithms that run our world, making artificial intelligence and machine learning both accessible and entertaining. Shane was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, and an Adweek Young Influential.

  • Janelle Shane Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

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  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Colorado, USA

  • Janelle Shane Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    Please Inquire

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Colorado, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

What AI Can Do - and Can't

AI is making headlines and disrupting entire industries. But what IS artificial intelligence, and what is it good at? At her AI humor blog, AiWeirdness.com, Shane watches machine learning algorithms struggle to deal with the complexities of the human world. From AIs that ...

AI is making headlines and disrupting entire industries. But what IS artificial intelligence, and what is it good at? At her AI humor blog, AiWeirdness.com, Shane watches machine learning algorithms struggle to deal with the complexities of the human world. From AIs that struggle to invent plausible paint colors, to AIs that struggle to recognize which pictures don’t actually contain giraffes or sheep, the funny failures of AI tell us a lot about their real-world shortcomings as well. Shane talks about the kinds of problems where AI will succeed, fail, or succeed at solving the wrong problem entirely.

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Are you Giving AI a Chess Problem or a Laundry Problem?

People use AI for all kinds of things, but they don’t always use AI’s strengths. Through entertaining examples, Shane shows the sometimes counterintuitive tasks at which AI will succeed – and the kinds of things that can go wrong when AI is given a problem ...

People use AI for all kinds of things, but they don’t always use AI’s strengths. Through entertaining examples, Shane shows the sometimes counterintuitive tasks at which AI will succeed – and the kinds of things that can go wrong when AI is given a problem that’s too difficult for it. Audiences will leave with an intuition about how to set their expectations for how well AI will do.

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About Keynote Speaker Janelle Shane

Janelle Shane’s AI humor blog, AIweirdness.com, looks at the strange side of artificial intelligence. She has been featured on the main TED stage, in the New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Popular Science, All Things Considered, Science Friday, and Marketplace, as well as being the inaugural Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian. Her book, “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place” uses cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the algorithms that run our world, making artificial intelligence and machine learning both accessible and entertaining. Shane was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, and an Adweek Young Influential.

More About Keynote Speaker Janelle Shane

Janelle Shane started studying artificial intelligence in 2002, diving into research on machine learning algorithms after a lecture for incoming freshmen at Michigan State University highlighted the unexpected, sometimes silly, and often mystifying, ways that AI would solve problems. She soon joined a research group that used machine learning algorithms to shape laser pulses to blast chemicals apart.

In 2007 she traveled to the University of St Andrews in Scotland where she studied laser tweezers, microscopic tractor beams that can manipulate small particles and bacteria to study. She returned to the USA in 2008 to pursue a PhD at University of California San Diego, where she helped build microscopic lasers for telecommunications. During her PhD she began experimenting with AI again, as text-generating language models came on the scene.

Shane’s blog AI Weirdness captured her AI experiments, from a neural network that named paint colors (such as Horble Gray and Stanky Bean), to one that generated recipes (one lowlight was a brownie recipe that included a cup of horseradish). She discovered that not only were the AI mistakes entertaining, but they also helped her explain how AI approaches problems.

While a laser scientist in industry (working on problems like programmable holograms for studying the brain, laser methods for measuring giant telescope mirrors, and virtual reality for mantis shrimp), Shane continued experimenting with and writing about AI. An AI-generated pickup line became the title of her book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.

Janelle Shane lives near Boulder, Colorado, where she is currently working on her next book.

Testimonials

Janelle was brilliant! She had the audience cracking up with her quirky humour and fresh examples as she cut through the AI hype to deliver her clear-eyed perspective. Our audience had technical backgrounds that varied enormously, and she delivered a talk that worked for them all.

Jeremy Moon

Curator, Better By Design CEO Summit 2019

In a time when everyone else is talking in circles about the inevitable takeover of man by machine, Janelle Shane comes to the rescue. She’s a delightfully funny and quick witted speaker who has her hand on the pulse of what advances in technology really look like.  Read More

Briar Goldberg

Director of Speaker Coaching at TED

As the chair of several large tech conferences, I work with hundreds of speakers a year. Janelle’s professionalism, sense of humor, and almost magical ability to turn the esoteric arcana of technology into fascinating stories the audience can’t stop talking about is unmatched.

Alistair Croll

Chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletech, and author of Lean Analytics.

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