About Me

Born and raised in the tropical Costa Rica, my journey now has me exploring the thrilling corn mazes from Indiana. I am recent PhD graduate in Industrial Engineering working on Human-Computer Interaction under the supervision of Dr. Juan Wachs. I received my Licenciatura (Lic.) degree in Computer Engineering at Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. I am interested on how human collaboration, understanding and learning can be enhanced and assessed by leveraging Virtual and Augmented Reality techniques and non-verbal communication cues (e.g. gestures).

A Licenciatura is a degree technically higher than a Bachelor's degree, but technically lower than a Master's degree.

As a member of the Intelligent Systems and Assistive Technologies Laboratory (ISAT Lab), I developed theories and technology to aid people, primarily in the healthcare domain. I have recently been working in a project for the United States Department of Defense to create the System for Telementoring with Augmented Reality (STAR). With STAR, surgeons in medical facilities or austere environments can receive surgical instruction from a remotely located specialist, directly into their field of view.

EDUCATION

Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago. Costa Rica

Licenciatura in Computer Engineering

GPA: 83.5/100, Class Rank 3

Thesis Title: Research, Design and Construction of a Telementoring Interface for the Recognition and Capture of Real-Time Touch Gestures.

2016 - 2010

Licenciatura Degree

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. United States

PhD in Industrial Engineering

Current GPA: 3.75/4.00

Dissertation Title: Assessing Collaborative Physical Tasks via Gestural Analysis using the "MAGIC" Architecture.

Final Examination to be held on July 2020

2016 - 2020

Doctoral Degree

When I am not burrowed in the lab, I spend my time hiking, playing board games and as a in-progress novelist. If you want to learn more about this, feel free to check my Beyond Research section. You might also contact me if you have any questions, I would love to hear from you.

EXPERIENCE

2016 - 2020

Research Assistant

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. United States

Responsible for a variety of tasks, including my doctoral thesis project that explores how to evaluate the collaboration between agents by analyzing the gestures they use. In addition, I am part of a surgical telementoring project sponsored by the Department of Defense.

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. United States

Researched and developed a large-scale interactive display based in touch inputs. The device was one of the main components of a telementoring system used by expert surgeons to transfer surgical instruction remotely.

2015 - 2016

Undergraduate Research Assistant

2014 - 2015

Lecturer Assistant

Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago, Costa Rica

The assistantship included the design, lecturing, grading, and student mentoring of two undergraduate level courses with an average of 40 students each: "Introduction to Coding" and "Coding Workshop".

2014 - 2015

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Cartago, Costa Rica

Lead researcher in the development and use of a Display Wall with autostereoscopic screens. In addition, the work included the maintenance of the laboratory visualization clusters.

NOTABLE PROJECTS

The goal of this multidisciplinary project is to provide combat medics with real-time assistance using augmented reality. The local medic wears an augmented reality head-mounted display that displays surgical instructions authored by a remotely-located mentor. These annotations are displays onto the patient’s body, at the correct position and depth (Video).

This project developed an architecture capable of assessing task performance through gesture-related metrics. The architecture leverages a data structure capable of abstracting gestures’ morphology, meaning and context. This project allows to compare gestures performed by different agents (e.g. mentor/mentee)

MAGIC

Multi-Agent Gestural Instruction Comparer

This project develops artificial intelligence to assist surgeons through medical procedures. The system uses a tablet to acquire the view of the operating field. These images are used as input for a Deep Neural Network. The network predicts text descriptions representing the instructions to perform in the current step of the procedure. These instructions are then conveyed to the surgeons via text-to-speech (Video).

STAR

System for Telementoring With Augmented Reality

AI-Medic

Artificial Intelligent Mentor for Trauma Surgery