Christopher
MacLellan

General Information

Email:
cmaclell@gatech.edu
Phone:
404-894-6760
Location - Building:
TSRB
Location - Room:
230B
Roles:
Professor (any rank)
Primary Unit:
College of Computing

Details

Degrees with subject and Postdoc Experience:
Degree Type
B.S.
Subject
Computer Science & Mathematics
Year
2010
Institution
University of Wyoming
Location
Laramie
Degree Type
M.S.
Subject
Human-Computer Interaction
Year
2015
Institution
Carnegie Mellon University
Location
Pittsburgh
Degree Type
Ph.D.
Subject
Human-Computer Interaction
Year
2017
Institution
Carnegie Mellon University
Location
Pittsburgh
Statement of Research Interests:

My work aims to improve our understanding of how people teach and learn and to build AI systems that can teach and learn like people do. I explore the development of computational models of human learning and how these models can support the development of effective learning technologies at scale.

Statement of Teaching Interests:

I teach the following two classes:
CS 4635/7637 – Knowledge-Based AI (Fall)
CS 8803 – Human-AI Interaction (Spring)

Selection of recent research, scholarly, and creative activities:

MacLellan, C.J. (2025). Model Human Learners: Computational Models to Guide Instructional Design. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Wang, Z., Harrer, E., Zhu, T., Dai, Z., & MacLellan, C. J. (2025). Deep Taxonomic Networks for Unsupervised Hierarchical Prototype Discovery. In Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

Barari, N., Lian, X., and MacLellan, C.J. (2026). Robust Incremental Learning of Visual Concepts without Catastrophic Forgetting. Cognitive Systems Research.

Lawley, L., & MacLellan, C. J. (2024). VAL: Interactive Task Learning with GPT Dialog Parsing. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Zhou, J., Roy, A., Gupta, S., Weitekamp, D., & MacLellan, C.J. (2026). When Should Users Check? Modeling Confirmation Frequency in Multi-Step Agentic AI Tasks. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Gupta, A., Reddig, J., Caló, T., Weitekamp, D., & MacLellan, C.J. (2025). Beyond Final Answers: Evaluating Large Language Models for Math Tutoring. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education.

Zhang, Q., Smith, G., Li, Z., Dong, Y., Harpstead, E., & Maclellan, C. (2025). Dice Adventure: An Asymmetrical Collaborative Game for Exploring the Hybrid Teaming Effects. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.