John R. Gallagher

John R. Gallagher is professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he also is a faculty affiliate at the School of Information Sciences. He is the author of Case Study Research in the Digital Age and Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. He fuses qualitative inquiry with natural language processing and machine learning to study social media.

AI Through the Experts’ Eyes

Communicating Complex Ideas

By John R. Gallagher

AI Through the Experts’ Eyes reveals the humanity behind artificial intelligence. John R. Gallagher foregrounds practitioners’ stories and the real-life culture from which these disruptive technologies emerge. Representing reality to computers is at the heart of AI, and Gallagher spotlights the challenges of doing so under the combined pressures of the break-neck pace of these technologies’ growth and ever-present hype, both external and internal. Drawing on more than 100 interviews with AI scientists and practitioners, the author showcases the ways AI researchers face these challenges through writing and communicating their findings, including how they define terms, work in teams, share their research, and approach ethics.