Who we are

The Teachable AI Lab (or TAIL for short) is an interdisciplinary research group at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing (find us at TSRB 230B). Our mission is to better understand how people teach and learn and to build machines that can teach and learn like people do. We engage in both use-inspired and fundamental research to achieve this mission.

What we do

Our research focuses primarily on three thrust areas: (1) Teachable Systems, (2) Human-Like AI/ML Models, and (3) Computational Models of Human Learning and Decision Making. As highlighted in the following figure, these thrust areas are synergistic and support one another.

Three Teachable AI Lab research thrusts and how they relate to one another

Within each thrust, we aim to address the following questions:

  • Teachable Systems: How do we build systems people can teach and interact with, like they would another human, while still taking advantage of key non-human features of AI/ML systems?

  • Human-like AI/ML: How do we develop cognitive systems that can learn like humans (incrementally, with few examples, etc.) and that produce human relatable/explainable/understandable outputs? The emphasis will be on both developing distinct AI and ML components as well as on putting these components together to create integrated systems. See this page for more info on our efforts to build a community and research program around this topic.

  • Computational Models of Human Learning and Decision Making: How can we leverage human data to guide human-like computational model design? How can we leverage these human-like models to better understand human decision making and learning?

For more information about our lab, see our lab vision blog post and our pages on research and publications.

Our values

Our lab is committed to developing a positive lab culture where individuals are supported and invested in the lab mission. To support this commitment, we have created a lab manual that describes our lab, the cultural values we aspire to, and expectations for lab members.

Interested in getting involved?

If you are a Georgia Tech student, then your first entry point to getting involved with the lab will likely be an independent study. Please review our independent study guide to see if this is a good option for you. Note, all students interested in conducting an independent study should follow the steps in this guide before reaching out via email.

If you are not a Georgia Tech student or are looking for something other than an independent study, then please fill out this application to apply to work in the lab directly. We will get notified when you submit your application and will follow up about available opportunities. If you do follow up via email, then please reference your application in the email.