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.
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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.
