jaylin herskovitz
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I'm an incoming Assistant Professor at Tufts University Computer Science. My research is at the intersection of HCI, AI, and accessibility: I develop tools for people to create personal assistive software. I draw from techniques in end-user programming, mobile sensing, and machine learning, and I adopt co-design approaches to design and build novel systems.

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✨ I am joining Tufts CS as an assistant professor starting January 2026! Interested Ph.D students should apply through the department and reach out via email.

Jaylin Herskovitz will join the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University as an Assistant Professor in January 2026. Her research focuses on accessibility and AI-based assistive technologies, DIY technology, and AR/VR. Her work combines qualitative methods with technical system building, and she works with people with disabilities to design, develop, and evaluate AI-based assistive technology. Her work has been published in top-tier HCI conferences, including CHI, UIST, and ASSETS. Jaylin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, where she was advised by Anhong Guo. During her Ph.D., Jaylin was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and completed internships with Apple AI/ML Research and Microsoft Research.

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I'm currently building TADA Lab: the Tufts AI, Design, and Accessibility Lab. Interested PhD students should apply to the Tufts Computer Science Department by the December 15th, 2025 deadline. Interested Masters and Undergraduate students should reach out via email in January 2026.

News

June 2025:

🎓 Passed my thesis defense!

Feb 2025:

🏆 Received the Susan Lipschutz Award for Rackham graduate students, recognizing social responsibility in research.

Oct 2024:

📄 Attending UIST 2024 to present ProgramAlly!

June 2024:

☕ Presented work from our lab at VISIONS 2014, a vendor fair for services for the blind hosted by the Ann Arbor District Library. Ellie Seehorn and I wrote an article about the event published in the ACM Crossroads magazine.

June 2024:

☕ Selected to attend HCIC as a University of Michigan representative. Excited to chat with old and new friends!

Nov 2024:

🎉 Selected as a finalist for the CSE honors competition, highlighting outstanding research in the department!

May 2023:

🍎 Starting internship at Apple AI/ML Research in Seattle, working with Cole Gleason

March 2023:

📄 Attending CHI 2023 to present my paper: Hacking, Switching, Combining: Understanding and Supporting DIY Assistive Technology Design by Blind People

June 2022:

📄 XSpace, a toolkit for enabling spatially-aware distributed collaboration, accepted to ISS 2022

March 2022:

🏆 Project CollabAlly awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI 2022

Dec 2021:

☕ Giving a talk on mobile AR accessibility at Cornell Tech's XR Access Initiative Seminar.

Nov 2021:

☕ Serving on the organizing committee for ASSETS 2022 as a web design co-chair.

Oct 2021:

📄 Two demos CollabAlly (video) and ImageExplorer (video) appeared at ASSETS 2021

March 2021:

🏆 Awarded NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship, read about my research proposal here.

Oct 2020:

📄 Attending ASSETS 2020 to present our work on Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible

May 2019:

🍎 Starting internship at Apple in Pittsburgh, Pensylvania with Jeff Bigham

May 2019:

📄 Attending CHI 2019 to present our work from last summer on Opportunities for In-Home Augmented Reality Guidance

May 2019:

🎓 Graduated with my B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan! Excited to start my Ph.D in the fall!

May 2018:

☕ Starting internship at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington with Eyal Ofek and Adam Fourney

Apr 2018:

📄 Attending CHI 2018 Workshop on Novel Interaction Techniques for Collaboration in VR to present our work on Crowdsourcing for Effortless Creation of Collaborative AR Spaces

Attending

  • Oct 13-16, 2024: UIST 2024, Pittsburgh, PA
  • Oct 23-25, 2023: ASSETS 2023, New York, NY
  • Apr 23-28, 2023: CHI 2023, Hamburg, Germany
  • Apr 30 - May 5, 2022: CHI 2022, New Orleans, LA

Publications

2025

Weaving Sound Information to Support Real-Time Sensemaking of Auditory Environments: Co-Designing with a DHH User
Jeremy Zhengqi Huang, Jaylin Herskovitz, Liang-Yuan Wu, Cecily Morrison, Dhruv Jain
CHI 2025
pdf ·  ACM DL
“Trying to Piece It Together”: Exploring Accessible Error Detection in Emerging Privacy Techniques With Blind People.
Rahaf Alharbi, Angela Cheong, Jaylin Herskovitz, Robin Brewer, Sarita Schoenebeck
ASSETS 2025
pdf ·  ACM DL

2024

ProgramAlly: Creating Custom Visual Access Programs via Multi-Modal End-User Programming
Jaylin Herskovitz, Andi Xu, Rahaf Alharbi, Anhong Guo
UIST 2024
pdf ·  ACM DL ·  video ·  30s preview
Misfitting With AI: How Blind People Verify and Contest AI Errors
Rahaf Alharbi, Pa Lor, Jaylin Herskovitz, Sarita Schoenebeck, Robin Brewer
ASSETS 2024
pdf

2023

Hacking, Switching, Combining: Understanding and Supporting DIY Assistive Technology Design by Blind People
Jaylin Herskovitz, Andi Xu, Rahaf Alharbi, Anhong Guo
CHI 2023
pdf ·  ACM DL ·  video ·  30s preview ·  full talk ·  dataset

2022

XSpace: An Augmented Reality Toolkit for Enabling Spatially-Aware Distributed Collaboration
Jaylin Herskovitz, Yi Fei Cheng, Anhong Guo, Alanson Sample, Michael Nebeling
ISS 2022
pdf ·  video ·  code
UbiChromics: Enabling Ubiquitously Deployable Interactive Displays with Photochromic Paint
Amani Alkayyali, Yasha Iravantchi, Jaylin Herskovitz, Alanson P. Sample
ISS 2022
pdf
An image of a blue bed in a hotel room. There are bounding boxes on the image around the bed and pillows. There are speech bubbles pointing to the bounding boxes that say "A white pillow" and "The bed is blue". There is also a pointing hand icon on the image, indicating that someone is touching the image to hear the speech.
Image Explorer: Multi-Layered Touch Exploration to Make Images Accessible
Jaewook Lee, Jaylin Herskovitz, Yi-Hao Peng, Anhong Guo
CHI 2022 Paper & ASSETS 2021 Demo
paper pdf ·  demo pdf ·  ACM DL ·  full video ·  30s preview ·  talk
A screenshot of Google Docs with various annotations. The annotations describe features of Collab Ally, and say "Visual Cue A: Collaborators", "Visual Cue B: Cursor", "Visual Cue C: Comments", "Visual Cue D: Highlighted Text", and "Audio Feature A: Spatial Audio".
CollabAlly: Accessible Collaboration Awareness in Document Editing
Phipson Lee, Zhuohao Zhang, Jaylin Herskovitz, JooYoung Seo, Anhong Guo
Honorable Mention CHI 2022 Paper & ASSETS 2021 Demo
paper pdf ·  demo pdf ·  ACM DL ·  full video ·  30s preview ·  talk ·  code

2021

A man using a virtual reality headset, holding a controller up. There are lines drawn on top of the image to show parts of his body being tracked for XRStudio configuration
XRStudio: A Virtual Production Technology Probe for Immersive Instructional Experiences
Michael Nebeling, Shwetha Rajaram, Liwei Wu, Yi Fei Cheng, Jaylin Herskovitz
CHI 2021
pdf ·  ACM DL · video

2020

Two example prototypes for making AR apps accessible. A: Foundational Accessibility. Screenshot of a virtual chair with a voice over target around it, a speech bubble shows the app announcing "Back of chair with blue cushion". B: Scanning. Screenshot of AR grid overlaid on a coffee table. Speech bubbles show the app announcing "Found a new horizontal surface" and "Scanned 2 surfaces totaling 2.3 square meters".
Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible
Jaylin Herskovitz, Jason Wu, Samuel White, Amy Pavel, Gabriel Reyes, Anhong Guo, Jeffrey P. Bigham
ASSETS 2020
pdf · ACM DL · video · talk
A diagram of Bashon. From left to right: A screenshot of a file system is broken into three sections by red dashed lines. For each section, to create the crowdworker request, that section is combined with the desired commands. Then, crowdworkers validate each section by voting, resulting in a single final set of validated commands.
A Hybrid Crowd-Machine Workflow for Program Synthesis
Yan Chen, Jaylin Herskovitz, Walter S. Lasecki, Steve Oney
VL/HCC 2020
pdf · IEEE Xplore
A screenshot of a code editor in EdCode. There is a hand pointing icon towards a button that says "Link", and a yellow box overlaid on the screenshot says "Select the associated code context below!"
EdCode: Towards Personalized Support at Scale for Remote Assistance in CS Education
Yan Chen, Jaylin Herskovitz, Gabriel Matute, April Wang, Sang Won Lee, Walter S. Lasecki, Steve Oney
Best Short Paper Award VL/HCC 2020
pdf · IEEE Xplore

2019

A series of images of someone using an AR headset to show instructions for hanging a shelf. In the images, they are using a controller to measure the wall, placing two supports, and placing a shelf.
Opportunities for In-Home Augmented Reality Guidance
Jaylin Herskovitz, Eyal Ofek, Walter S. Lasecki, Adam Fourney
CHI 2019 Poster
pdf · ACM DL

2018

A screenshot of a 3D web application used to create an AR prototype of an interactive kitchen application. In the screenshot, there are three models of AR headsets, which represent people walking around and reviewing the application. The location of the models updates in real time as people move around.
Crowdsourcing for Effortless Creation of Collaborative AR Spaces
Jaylin Herskovitz, Janani Chinnam, Isabelle Wong, Mengyao Liu, Junlin Mo, Sang Won Lee, Walter S. Lasecki
CHI 2018 Workshop on Novel Interaction Techniques for Collaboration in VR
pdf