About
Connor McAllister joined the AB Computer Science faculty in 2023 as Assistant Professor — the youngest faculty member in the AB Sciences division and the most recently-credentialed. He came to AB after four years as a research scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, where his work focused on applied machine learning for the natural sciences (particularly ecology, hydrology, and agronomy).
A native of small-town western Pennsylvania, McAllister holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2019), an M.S. in Machine Learning from CMU (2017), and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Allegheny College (2014), where he was Phi Beta Kappa and a Goldwater Scholar.
At AB he teaches the introductory programming sequence (a Hilltop Core elective open to all majors), the data-structures and algorithms courses required for the CS major, and a popular junior-level elective on machine learning. He is the founding director of the AB Applied AI Lab — a partnership between the CS department, the Mathematics department, and the WV Department of Agriculture aimed at building practical AI tools for West Virginia small farms and watersheds.
Education
- 2019Ph.D., Computer Science — Carnegie Mellon University. Dissertation: Sample-Efficient Machine Learning for Ecological Time-Series Data.
- 2017M.S., Machine Learning — Carnegie Mellon University.
- 2014B.S., Computer Science & Mathematics (Phi Beta Kappa) — Allegheny College. Goldwater Scholar.
Teaching
Professor McAllister teaches the foundational programming sequence and the AB Applied AI Lab. He insists on closed laptops in the first eight weeks of CS 101 and refuses to apologize for it.
- CS 101Introduction to Programming & Computational ThinkingA Hilltop Core elective open to all majors. Python-based; no prior experience required. Famously closed-laptop for the first 8 weeks.
- CS 310Data Structures & AlgorithmsA required junior-level CS course covering the standard ADT curriculum plus an introduction to algorithm analysis.
- CS 420Applied Machine LearningA senior elective taught from a practical, applications-first perspective. Each student delivers a working ML system as their final project.
Research, Applied AI & Industry Background
McAllister's research focuses on sample-efficient machine learning — that is, methods that work when training data is small, noisy, and expensive to collect (the typical regime for ecological and agricultural problems). His doctoral work was on Bayesian neural networks for ecological time-series, and his recent applied work has been on small-farm crop monitoring using low-cost sensors and edge ML.
He is the founding director of the AB Applied AI Lab, which currently has 11 student researchers working on three funded projects: a soil-moisture forecasting system for WV vineyards, an automated invasive-species image classifier for the WV DNR, and a small-stream temperature monitor in partnership with Dr. Reeves's Tygart Stream Project.
Selected Publications & Presentations
- 2024McAllister C & Patel R. "Edge ML for Small-Farm Crop Monitoring." NeurIPS Workshop on AI for Earth Sciences.
- 2022McAllister C et al. "Sample-Efficient Bayesian Neural Networks for Ecological Time-Series." JMLR.
- 202114 patents granted while at Microsoft Research.
- 2025Plenary, ACM SIGCSE, "Teaching CS at a Small Rural University: What I Got Wrong."
Honors & Service
- 2024AB Faculty Early-Career Research Award.
- 2023WV Department of Agriculture Innovation Partner Award.
- 2021Microsoft Research Distinguished Engineer Award.
- 2019CMU Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Honorable Mention.
- 2014Goldwater Scholar.
There is exactly one thing harder than being a CS researcher at Microsoft. It is being a CS teacher who has to look a sophomore in the eye on the day they realize that machine learning is real and that nobody at their hometown school knew it. That second job is the only one of the two that's indispensable.— Dr. Connor McAllister
Beyond the Classroom
McAllister moved to Philippi from Redmond, Washington, in 2023 with his wife Hannah (a remote software engineer at GitHub) and their dog. He is a serious mountaineer (he has climbed every peak in West Virginia's top-100 list), a frequent visitor to the AB Equestrian Center where he is learning to ride for the first time at 32, and a volunteer instructor at the Barbour County Code Club for middle schoolers.
He is a college-football neutral (which he says he developed at CMU and has not yet shaken), a serious home brewer of West Coast IPAs, and the AB student-favorite faculty member at the annual ping-pong tournament (undefeated 2024–25).