Minsoo Choi, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Graphics Technology (CGT), is celebrating successfully defending his dissertation on April 17, 2025. Choi was also appointed as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science of Oklahoma State University, an R1 university with top-level research activity.
His dissertation, “Exploring Collaboration with an Intelligent Virtual Agent,” tackled significant technical challenges in AI-driven collaboration and examined how the design of virtual agents and collaborative tasks affects human perception and user experience in virtual reality. His advisor and mentor, Christos Mousas, is a CGT associate professor and Director of the VR Lab. Mousas says Choi’s balance between technical rigor and conceptual depth makes him well-suited to lead innovative, cross-disciplinary research in his new role.
“Mentoring Minsoo during his Ph.D. has been an incredibly fulfilling journey,” Mousas said. “He brought an exceptional combination of creativity, technical expertise, and a deep commitment to research. He was not just a student. He was a collaborator—someone who helped elevate the quality of the research we conduct in CGT's VR Lab.”
Choi’s Ph.D. work reflects the CGT department’s commitment to bridging technically sophisticated systems with theoretical and artistic perspectives. In his dissertation, Choi researched collaboration with virtual agents, which simulate human collaboration using AI and virtual reality. He specifically used jigsaw puzzle co-solving activities as collaborative tasks to see how the designs of virtual agents and collaborative tasks influence human perception, user experience, and human behavior metrics.
He found that human perception of the virtual agent, including its intelligence, can be tailored both by the virtual agent and collaborative task design. These studies also revealed that the self-correction behaviors of the virtual agent could partially recover its trustworthiness. Choi plans to expand his research by employing other factors, such as puzzle-solving strategy or verbal communication through large language models.
“I can say that my time at Purdue has been awesome and valuable,” Choi said. “During my Ph.D. studies, I discovered the joy of research and developed a deeper passion for it. This was largely due to the opportunity to collaborate with excellent peers and to work under the guidance of an open-minded and supportive advisor.”
Choi thanked his advisor, Christos Mousas; his dissertation committee members, Dominic Kao, Liang He and Sooyeon Jeong; and his lab mates in the VR Lab.
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