Janelle Shane

Janelle Shane is an optics research scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, writer, and public speaker. She keeps a popular science blog called AI Weirdness, where she documents various machine learning algorithms, both ones submitted by readers and ones she personally creates. Shane's first book You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How AI Works And Why It's Making The World A Weirder Place was published in November 2019 covering many of the topics from her AI Weirdness blog for a general audience.

Early life and education Shane studied electrical engineering at Michigan State University and graduated in 2007. She started out in a research group that worked on genetic algorithms, and then worked with Marcos Dantus on genetic algorithms for femtosecond lasers. She earned her master's degree in physics at the University of St Andrews, where she worked with Kishan Dholakia on pulse shaping and dispersion compensation. She is also working on low size, weight and power (SWaP) 3D wind sensor technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles. Shane writes for Fast Company and O'Reilly Media. She has collaborated with CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times. She argued that while artificial intelligence is celebrated as a gift to society, in reality it often doesn't live up to the hype. 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 was released in November 2019.

Selected publications