Jerry Alan Fails was a featured keynote speaker at the 30th ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2025 and received the Impactful Paper Award for “Interactive Machine Learning” published in 2003 that he co-authored with Dan R. Olsen Jr.
The paper “Interactive machine learning” was presented at Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2003 and was awarded “Outstanding Paper Award” that year and has been highly cited since then. Dr. Fails presented the research paper and a brief overview of related work. The original abstract provides an overview of the initial research and approach: Perceptual user interfaces (PUIs) are an important part of ubiquitous computing. Creating such interfaces is difficult because of the image and signal processing knowledge required for creating classifiers. We propose an interactive machine-learning (IML) model that allows users to train, classify/view, and correct the classifications. The concept and implementation details of IML are discussed and contrasted with classical machine learning models. Evaluations of two algorithms are also presented. We also briefly describe Image Processing with Crayons (Crayons), a tool for creating new camera-based interfaces using a simple painting metaphor. The Crayons tool embodies our notions of interactive machine learning.
Immediately following the keynote presentation, a panel of scholars including Jerry Alan Fails, Margaret Burnett, Elizabeth Churchill, and Krzysztof Gajos discussed the impact of Interactive Machine Learning on the field, and the future of intelligent user interfaces.
Beyond being a well-cited paper (more than 780 citations), several scholars noted at the conference how it: significantly impacted subsequent research, is used as an example for good research, its principles are taught in their classes, and how they use it while mentoring students conducting research.