Jess VB
Dr. Jessica Van Brummelen
Senior HCI Research Scientist
Niantic Spatial, Inc.
London, United Kingdom
Hello! I’m Jess, a Human-Computer Interaction Research Scientist. I work at Niantic Spatial, where I research & develop augmented reality related applications to help people explore the world around them.
Before Niantic, I obtained my PhD in computer science at MIT while working in Dr. Hal Abelson’s App Inventor lab. There, I developed conversational agent technology to empower and teach young learners about AI.
Prior to MIT, I was a mechanical engineering student at UBC, where I researched autonomous vehicles and driver assistance systems in Dr. Homayoun Najjaran’s ACIS lab.
selected publications
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ImaginateAR: AI-Assisted In-Situ Authoring in Augmented RealityIn UIST ’25: Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology,, , 2025Busan ,Korea , -
AdjustAR: AI-Driven In-Situ Adjustment of Site-Specific Augmented Reality ContentIn UIST ’25: Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology,, , 2025Busan ,Korea , -
CoCreatAR: Enhancing Authoring of Outdoor Augmented Reality Experiences Through Asymmetric CollaborationIn Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,, , 2025Yokohama ,Japan , -
Don’t Look Now: Audio/Haptic Guidance for 3D Scanning of LandmarksIn Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,, , 2024Honolulu ,USA , -
Learning affects trust: Design recommendations and concepts for teaching children—and nearly anyone—about conversational agentsIn Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2023 -
What Do Children and Parents Want and Perceive in Conversational Agents? Towards Transparent, Trustworthy, Democratized AgentsIn Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, 2023 -
Empowering K-12 Students to Understand and Design Conversational Agents: Concepts, Recommendations and Development PlatformsMassachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022 -
Teaching students about conversational AI using CONVO, a conversational programming agentIn 2021 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2021 -
“Alexa, Can I Program You?”: Student Perceptions of Conversational Artificial Intelligence Before and After Programming AlexaIn Interaction Design and Children, 2021 -
Teaching tech to talk: K-12 conversational artificial intelligence literacy curriculum and development toolsIn Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021 -
CONVO: What does conversational programming need?In 2020 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2020 -
Zhorai: Designing a conversational agent for children to explore machine learning conceptsIn Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2020 -
Tools to create and democratize conversational artificial intelligenceMassachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019 -
The popstar, the poet, and the grinch: Relating artificial intelligence to the computational thinking framework with block-based codingIn Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Thinking Education, 2019 -
Autonomous vehicle perception: The technology of today and tomorrowTransportation research part C: emerging technologies, 2018
