Jerry Alan Fails

short bio

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. My primary focus of research is Human-Computer Interaction, with a current focus on technologies that support children’s creativity, mobility, and collaboration.
I received my Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland in 2009, where I was an active member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) for six years while working with Dr. Allison Druin. Prior to that I received my MS in Computer Science at Brigham Young University in 2003 working Dr. Dan Olsen Jr. While at the University of Maryland I was integrally involved with Kidsteam, an intergenerational design team consisting of young children and adults working together to design technology.

research interests

Human-computer interaction, user interfaces, educational technologies, mobile devices, children, older adults, design (user-centered, participatory, cooperative inquiry), ubiquitous computing.

research philosophy

Put abstract or first paragraph of research statement here.

Research Philsophy (PDF) (work in progress)

current projects

Mobile Collaboration for Young Children (Video) — Jerry Alan Fails, Allison Druin, Mona Leigh Guha, Gene Chipman, Kevin McGehee, Juliette Taillandier, and Shaili Desai
Mobile devices can support the learning experience as children create narratives in various contexts. Mobile device limitations can be overcome by bringing people and devices together. In addition, social interaction and collaboration are essential to the emotional and cognitive development of young children.

Children as Design Partners (Intergenerational Design Teams) — Allison Druin, Jaime Montemayor, Juan Pablo Hourcade, Gene Chipman, Hilary Browne Hutchinson, Mona Leigh Guha, Jerry Alan Fails, Sante Simms, Wayne Churaman, Evan Golub, Sheri Massey, Shaili Desai, Allison Farber, and more
Children, ages 7-11, work with HCIL faculty/staff/students after school and over the summer to create new technolgies for children.

past projects

Connecting Generations — Bo Xie, Allison Druin, Jerry Alan Fails, Evan Golub, Sheri Massey, Kiki Schneider, Alex Kruskal
Expanding cooperative inquiry to bridge the gap between the "younger" and "older" generations. Designing with young children and older adults to create technologies that bridge the communication gap.

Tangible Flags — Gene Chipman, Allison Druin, Jerry Alan Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Sante Simms
Using Tangible Flags, children on field trips can easily collaborate to create and connect digital information to the real world, but also have the flexibility to explore independently.

PatternFinder (Video Demo) — by Jerry Alan Fails, Amy Karlson, Layla Shahamat, and Ben Shneiderman, and more
An integrated interface for visual query and result-set visualization for search and discovery of temporal patterns within multivariate and categorical data sets. Pattern queries allow events, event sets, event attributes, and time spans to be specified so as to produce powerful queries that are difficult to express in other formalisms.

Classroom of the Future — Allison Druin, Jaime Montemayor, Gene Chipman, Mona Leigh Guha, Jerry Alan Fails, Sante Simms, Wayne Churaman
Mobile and embedded technologies are created in partnership with pre-school children and teachers at the Center for Young Children.

Mouse for Older Adults (unpublished) — Jerry Alan Fails, François Guimbretière
There are specific areas that are problematic for older adults when they use a mouse: size, shape, buttons, and clutching. These areas are founded with an ethnographic study, and then, using these principles as guides, a mouse that blends the positive characteristics of a mouse and trackball was designed, created and evaluated. Evaluations showed the new mouse was preferred by older adult users with no significant loss in performance power.

Screen Crayons (Video Demo) — Trent Taufer, Dan R. Olsen Jr., Jerry Alan Fails
ScreenCrayons is a system for collecting annotations on any type of document or visual information from any application. The basis for the system is a screen capture upon which the user can highlight the relevant portions of the image. The user can define any number of topics for organizing notes. Each topic is associated with a highlighting "crayon."

Image Processing with Crayons (Master's Thesis at BYU) (Video Demo) — Jerry Alan Fails, Dan R. Olsen Jr.
Supports rapid perceptual user interface (PUI) prototyping by facilitating the creation of a visual classifier. Using this tool, image classifiers can be created in minutes not months.

Light Widgets (Video Demo) — Jerry Alan Fails, Dan R. Olsen Jr.
A system for ubiquitous interaction that does not require users to carry any physical devices. In this system, the environment is instrumented with camera/processor combinations that watch users while protecting their privacy. Any visible surface can be turned into an interactive widget triggered by skin-colored objects.