PhD Student, XR and Human-AI Interaction Research
I build and evaluate LLM-driven agents that teach people procedural skills in XR.
Open to research internships
Contact Me Research CVI am a second-year Ph.D. researcher at Purdue University working on education in XR and human-AI interaction in XR. I build and evaluate LLM-driven pedagogical agents that teach procedural skills in VR, and I study how people co-design with AI agents in immersive spaces. I have first-author papers at IEEE ISMAR and TVCG, and I prototype in Unity/C#, Python, and web stacks.
Advisors: Dr. Christos Mousas and Dr. Alejandra Magana, School of Applied and Creative Computing.
A. L. Jimenez, P. Acevedo, M. Choi, D. Cui, C. Mousas
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. of IEEE ISMAR 2026), TBA(TBA), pp. TBA, 2026
First author. Designed an automated pipeline that converts lecture video into interactive immersive environments driven by LLM-based pedagogical agents (GPT and Llama).
A. L. Jimenez, P. Acevedo, C. Mousas
IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, pp. 131-141, 2025
First author. Designed the cost-based layout optimization and spatial-reasoning algorithms, built the full VR application, and ran the human-subjects evaluation.
P. Acevedo, A. L. Jimenez, A. Magana, B. Benes, C. Mousas
International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence & Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments, pp. 1-10, 2024
Second author. Contributed to system implementation, experimental design, data collection, and analysis.
Aug 2025 - Present
Advisor: Dr. Christos Mousas, School of Applied and Creative Computing
- Build and evaluate LLM-driven embodied pedagogical agents in VR that combine conversational behavior with agent actions in the simulated environment.
- Prototype in Unity/C# (agent behavior architectures, human-agent co-design workflows, spatial interaction techniques) and Python, and run human-subjects studies end to end (design, IRB, data collection, quantitative and qualitative analysis).
- Lead a PRISMA-style systematic review on psychomotor skill acquisition in VR (10,000+ records, reproducible Python screening pipeline).
- Collaborate across concurrent projects and mentor junior team members on XR development.
Jan 2024 - May 2025
Advisor: Dr. Kazumi Hatasa, School of Languages and Cultures
- Designed and built an immersive VR language-learning environment in Unity with text-to-speech conversational interaction and modular instructional activities.
- Optimized performance and ran usability testing so the system runs on standalone head-mounted displays in real classrooms.
2020 - 2022
- Built Escape VR, a networked multiplayer VR escape room (Unity, Photon), and ran a 60-participant user study on collaboration in shared virtual environments (advisor: Dr. Pablo Figueroa).
- Built Unity/C# components for Experience-Driven Optimization of Virtual Environments as a SURF fellow (advisor: Dr. Christos Mousas). Earlier NLP work with word2vec and TensorFlow.
Jan 2023 - May 2023
Feb 2022 - May 2022
Remote, two internship terms
- Analyzed and optimized customer projects for rendering performance and memory, and reviewed HLSL shaders.
- Built internal tooling and debugging utilities in C# and C++ that helped engineers localize performance bottlenecks.
June 2021 - Feb 2022
- Worked on visual recognition, NLP, and neural network research.
- Built a form to streamline an internal process, with a React frontend and a Kotlin backend.
2022
- Algorithms design and analysis: taught dynamic programming, graphs, and recursion to a group of 40 second-year students.
- Introduction to Systems and Computing Engineering, and Object-Oriented Programming: supported students with App Inventor, Unity, and Java projects.
Aug 2025 - Expected May 2029
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
- Advisor: Dr. Christos Mousas. Co-advisor: Dr. Alejandra Magana.
- Andrews Fellowship, a competitive institutional fellowship for incoming doctoral students.
Aug 2023 - May 2025
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
- Thesis: Human-AI Co-Design in Virtual Reality, a VR system in which an intelligent virtual agent proposes spatial layout modifications generated through cost-based optimization. Published at IEEE ISMAR 2025.
Jan 2019 - Apr 2023
Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia (ABET-accredited)
- Capstone: Escape VR, a networked multiplayer VR system for studying collaboration under time pressure, evaluated with 60 participants.
- Visual Computing Laboratory. Director of the Systems Engineering Student Council and student representative on several university committees. Board member of the ACM university chapter.
A workflow that turns a recorded video lecture into an interactive VR lecture. The instructor is recreated as a pedagogical agent with a cloned voice and gestures extracted from the original video, and a prompt-engineered LLM lets learners ask questions at expert-defined breakpoints and hear answers grounded in the lecture material. In a between-groups study (N = 69) comparing Video, Desktop, and Immersive versions, the Immersive condition produced significantly higher learning gains than the Video condition, along with higher engagement and intrinsic interest, at the cost of more mental effort.
The project involved two main components: first, students observed geometric figures alongside their corresponding equations, allowing them to visualize different transformations. The second part was more interactive, with exercises that required students to identify transformations between figures, encouraging active learning and engagement.
Feedback from the six participants revealed that VR had a positive effect on their understanding of geometric concepts. This outcome suggests that Altspace is an effective tool for educational purposes, particularly in enhancing both learning and social participation.
Therefore, the program receives a limited amount of information to start off picking a theme which will be used to determine the words that should be selected from a pool of vocabulary, either for their meaning or intent, in order to build a coherent sentence.
