Chris MacLellan

Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing.

I do research at the intersection of #CognitiveSystems, #AI, #HCI, #CognitiveScience, and #LearningScience. My work focuses on understanding how people teach and learn and building computational systems that can teach and learn like people do.


Outside work, I am into #dogs, #backyardchickens, #beekeeping, and #sourdough. I love #scifi and #fantasy.

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Devine Lu Linveganeauoire@merveilles.town
2025-01-17

"The friction is the meaning"
catandgirl.com/the-genius/
via @tehn on izzzzzi

cat: I've eliminated the friction!
girl: The friction is the meaning
Chris MacLellan boosted:
Chris ArmstrongRhodium103
2025-01-07

The student approached the Master and said "He wants to put a million people on Mars by 2040! That's so amazing!"

The Master replied. "I have a better plan. I will put a million people on Antarctica by 2040."

"But that sounds fucking insane. Why would you want to do something that stupid? It's a barren wasteland that's difficult to populate and would provide us with absolutely nothing!"

At that moment, the student was enlightened.

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Eric P. S. Baumerericpsb@hci.social
2025-01-07

If you were to write a more inclusive history of #HCI, whom would you include?

Context: prepping for my user-centered interface design course, the day on historical foundations is ALL WHITE DUDES: Vannevar Bush, Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Englebart, J.R. Licklider, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, etc etc...

Who else belongs in this canon?

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Rob Bellingerrbellinger
2024-12-25

@RickiTarr My favorite Etsy purchase

A disc-shaped orange plastic Christmas tree ornament featuring an etched and inked portrait of the mascot Gritty. Gritty is smiling maniacally. The outer ring of the disc reads FUCK AROUND above the portrait of Gritty's head, AND FIND OUT below. The lights of the Christmas tree are reflected in a nearby window.
Chris MacLellan boosted:
Ricki Bowie Knives TarrRickiTarr@beige.party
2024-12-25

You may not believe in The Gritch, but The Gritch is still coming to town

The mascot Gritty dressed as Santa jumping on a Christmas tree
Chris MacLellan boosted:
Douglasdouglasvb
2024-12-24

Working on revisions of a dissertation proposal with one of my PhD students. It's a slog but we'll get there by new year's day.

Chris MacLellan boosted:
2024-12-23

“Creating AI caricatures of disabled people does not help us dismantle systemic ableism. By taking us out of the equation, and positioning fake, digital characters as more credible narrators of our stories than we who actually live those stories, accessibility is literally dehumanized.”

Ashlee M Boyer’s response to an “AI”-enabled “accessibility” product is very good, and worth your time: ashleemboyer.com/blog/how-to-d

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Dr. Anna Latouranna@mathstodon.xyz
2024-12-22

I'm teaching my first lecture at the new job today, about probabilistic logic programming, probabilistic inference, and (weighted) model counting.

Some of the required reading is a paper (eccc.weizmann.ac.il/eccc-repor) that was written by a great mentor of mine, prof. dr. Fahiem Bacchus. He passed away just over 2 years ago, and I am honoured to keep his memory alive by teaching his ideas to a new generation of students. Hope to do him proud. 🌱

Please send good vibes? 🥺

#AcademicChatter #AcademicLife #AcademicMastodon #Teaching #Probability #ProbabilisticInference #Probabilities #Logic #LogicProgramming #PropositionalModelCounting #ProbabilisticLogicProgramming #ModelCounting #PropositionalLogic #WeightedModelCounting #DPLL #BayesianProbability #BayesNets #BasianStatistics #BayesianInference #BayesianNetworks #KnowledgeCompilation #DecisionDiagrams #BinaryDecisionDiagrams

Chris MacLellan boosted:

There's a movement in neuroscience suggesting we should be pursuing bigger bets with larger teams. I think there's a case for doing a bit of this, but I think it's a bad idea to prioritise it for two reasons, and a good case for saying we should be moving in the exact opposite direction.

Bigger bets generally means less money available for the smaller bets. This means fewer ideas being pursued. Similarly, larger teams means fewer people in leadership roles with ownership over their research direction. Again, fewer ideas and less diversity.

This is bad for neuro because most ideas have turned out to be wrong in the sense that they haven't moved us closer to a global understanding of how our brain's work. (By this I don't mean that they were bad ideas, or that they weren't worth pursuing!) This is maybe controversial so let me explain.

When I read papers from 50 or 100 years ago speculating about how the brain might work, I don't see a huge difference with how we talk about it now. Few (none?) of the big debates have been settled: innate versus learned, spikes versus rates, behaviourism versus cognitivism, ...

The second reason big bets/teams shouldn't be our focus is that it limits opportunities for the autonomy and development of less senior researchers. Let's be honest, if we start pursuing 'big bets' those bets will be the bets of the most senior scientists, not the junior ones.

Junior scientists will - to an even greater extent than currently - be relegated to implementing the ideas of senior scientists. That's bad for diversity of ideas, but it's also bad for developing a new generation of thinkers who might be able to break us out of our (proven unsuccessful) patterns.

That's why I think we should go in the opposite direction. Empower junior scientists. Don't make junior PIs beg for grant funding in competitions decided by the opinions of senior scientists. Don't make them postdocs subordinate to their supervisors.

Instead, fund junior scientists directly and independently. Let senior scientists compete with each other to work with these talented younger scientists. Give senior scientists a non-binding advisory role to help develop the talents of the junior scientists.

If we think larger teams might be important, let's find ways to empower groups of secure and independent scientists to work together positively and voluntarily - because it makes their work more impactful - rather than negatively and through necessity - because they need to get a job.

#neuroscience

Chris MacLellan boosted:
2024-12-19
Big round circle sculpture with googly eyesTwo deer in a sculpture with giant googly eyes
Chris MacLellan boosted:
2024-12-19

Join us at #CHI2025 for Advancing Post-growth HCI—a hybrid workshop to critically examine the hidden ways growth patterns manifest within HCI and how they can be challenged.

Online + on-site
Submit by Feb 13, 2025

Details: bit.ly/4gBS6Ys

#postGrowthHCI #degrowth

w/ @neha @naveena @cbecker @hongjinlin @martintom #shaowenbardzell #anupriyatuli #asrakaeenwani #jaredkatzman

## About the Workshop

---

To uncover how post-growth ideas might take shape in HCI, we organized and participated in a workshop titled *Post-growth HCI: Co-Envisioning HCI Beyond Economic Growth* at CHI 2024. The workshop sparked deep, enriching discussions, highlighting the critical need for foundational conversations about the technologies we design and the underlying values they perpetuate.

Building on this momentum, our CHI 2025 workshop aims to critically examine the many hidden ways growth patterns manifest within HCI and ask how HCI can use its research, design, and praxis to build a more emancipatory future. 

By bringing together HCI professionals, this workshop seeks to create a concrete conceptual foundation to *co-reflect* on growth patterns in HCI and *co-devise* strategies to reshape their influence, paving the way for transformative post-growth HCI practices.

This workshop series nurtures the *Post-growth HCI Collective* of scholars across borders, working in solidarity to challenge unjust and unsustainable growth narratives while collaboratively envisioning a post-growth future in HCI.
Chris MacLellan boosted:
2024-12-15

Just wrapped up teaching the first ever installment of my "Building Technologies for the Resistance" class — and what a privilege!

Students worked to identify unjust power disparities, and explored how different anarchist design principles could be used to help.

Syllabus: bit.ly/btr-syllabus

With permission, I'll share a few interesting projects that emerged in the coming weeks.

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Vegetable Gremlin ⍼​👻vegetablegremlin@jorts.horse
2024-12-14

Incredible. Apple Intelligence summarized BBC news to claim Luigi had shot himself. This not only had not happened but was not something BBC reported.

AI news summaries are a terrible idea because "just making up shit" is basically an unsolvable problem in LLMs
bbc.com/news/articles/cd0elzk2

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Nate Gaylinnngaylinn@tech.lgbt
2024-12-13

Ugh, just watched the video for Google's new Quantum computer, Willow.

I'm all for cool new kinds of computing, and Willow seems like a big advance, but the video is just... very misleading.

They start by implying that quantum computers are somehow more "natural" and contextually aware, like they're "in tune with the invisible web of life" or some nonsense like that. What does that have to do with anything?

They really minimize the fact that there are still only a handful of things we know how to do with a quantum computer, and they're not especially useful yet.

And the whole thing is branded as "Quantum AI" even though they did not discuss any AI applications.

Seems like Google continues to use their quantum research as a bullshit self-promotion exercise, which is a shame, really.

#google #quantumcomputing #ai

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Smudge The Insult Cat 🐀SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to
2024-12-08
(Cat lying in Baby Jesus basket in a manger scene)
Chris MacLellan boosted:
The Whore of BlahbylonThe_Whore_of_Blahbylon
2024-12-05

I'mma gonner.

Chris MacLellan boosted:
2024-12-05

Today: our next talk in the CCCM seminar series on "The Cognitive Science of Generative AI"

Anya Ivanova
Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology
on:
Dissociating language and thought in humans and in machines

(5 Dec 2024, 16:00 GMT, online)

psyc.bbk.ac.uk/cccm/cccm-semin

Chris MacLellan boosted:
2024-12-04

Donald Knuth will be giving his annual Christmas tree lecture Thursday next week. It'll be about strong and weak components in directed graphs and Tarjan's algorithm for computing them. I'm planning to go! It looks like it'll also be streamed online. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/musings.html

Chris MacLellan boosted:
Information Is Beautifulinfobeautiful@vis.social
2024-12-03

If you're aged 30 or more, then 50% of all human fossil fuel emissions happened during your lifetime

Bar chart shows the % of global fossil fuel emissions occurring in a lifetime with bars of different length for ages from 5 to 100 years. More emissions happen over a longer lifetime. During the life of an 85 year old, 90% of all  emissions happened. For someone age of 30 the rate is already 50%

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