About

Recent M.S. in Computer Science from Purdue (May 2026) and 2024 GEM Fellow. Lead contributor on MDD (ICCV 2025 Outstanding Paper) with Prof. Aniket Bera. I build ML pipelines and ship software people use, from cloud-backed mobile apps to full-stack AI tools.

I co-authored MDD (ICCV 2025 Outstanding Paper), built CodeSwitch at Microsoft, a physics-inference pipeline at Adobe, and a VR text-entry test bed at Google that became an IEEE ISEMV 2024 paper. B.S. from UMD; A.A. through Montgomery College.

Founded Spray, a street-art social app on App Store and Google Play. Led the XR Club at UMD as president, growing it to 300+ members.

Experience

  • May 2025 - Aug 2025

    Research Intern · Microsoft

    Redmond, WA

    • Built CodeSwitch, a VS Code extension with a voice-embodied peer programming agent using OpenAI Realtime API and VASA avatars.
    • Added persistent memory and code-context grounding, then validated with user studies (CSCW 2026 submission in prep).
    CodeSwitch demo
    • VS Code
    • OpenAI Realtime API
    • VASA
    • TypeScript

  • Aug 2022 - Present

    Founder · Spray

    College Park, MD

    • Shipped a street-art social app on App Store and Google Play where artists draw in AR and share geotagged work.
    • Embedded Unity AR (ARKit, ARCore, Lightship) in Expo React Native with Firebase, Mapbox, and Replicate FLUX.
    • Ran 30+ user interviews with muralists; won 2nd at UMD Dingman Pitch Competition.
    Spray AR demo
    • TypeScript
    • React Native
    • Expo
    • Unity
    • Mapbox
    • Firebase
    • Replicate

  • May 2024 - Aug 2024

    Research Intern · Adobe

    Fremont, WA

    • Built a system to infer physical properties of 3D assets using Segment Anything, Gemini VLM, and structured part representations.
    • Refined estimates with an NVIDIA Simplicits simulation-in-the-loop pipeline that re-queried the VLM with physics videos.
    Adobe internship demo
    • Python
    • Segment Anything
    • Gemini
    • NVIDIA Simplicits

  • May 2023 - Aug 2023

    Student Researcher · Google

    Fremont, WA

    • Engineered a VR text-entry test bed with configurable hand/keyboard layouts and automatic performance tracking.
    • Ran VR typing studies comparing entry methods across hand and keyboard representations.
    • Co-authored findings as first student author in our IEEE ISEMV 2024 publication.
    IEEE ISEMV 2024

    Hovering Over the Key to Text Input in XR

    Gonzalez-Franco, M., D. Abdlkarim, A. Bhatia, S. Macgregor, J. A. Fotso-Puepi (1st student author), E. J. Gonzalez, H. Seifi, M. Di Luca, and K. Ahuja

    Survey of XR text-input techniques centered on physical and virtual keyboards.

    • C#
    • Unity

  • May 2022 - Aug 2022

    Undergraduate Research Intern · Microsoft

    Redmond, WA

    • Built a VR endpoint for a hybrid-meeting prototype in Unity/C#, studying shared-content placement and avatar effects on body agency.
    • Prototyped virtual reflective surfaces as perceptual cues for remote-desktop and VR users.
    • Targeted gains in spatial awareness, body ownership, and co-presence in hybrid meetings.
    • C#
    • Unity

  • Dec 2021 - May 2023

    Scholar · 1st Cohort · AmazonNext

    College Park, MD

    • First AmazonNext cohort at UMD: product design, Alexa Skills Lab, and Amazon-UMD Design Challenge (4th place, VR Canvas LMS).
    • Shipped an Alexa skill on AWS that reminded students of upcoming assignments.
    • AWS
    • Alexa
    • Unity

  • Aug 2021 - May 2023

    Software Developer · IRIS Reads · UMD Reading & Language Lab

    College Park, MD

    • Advisor: Dr. Donald Bolger (Profile)
    • Built a 5+ app VR/AR literacy suite in Unity/C# for children with reading disabilities; supported an MII grant.
    • Developed a VR word-formation game combining semantics, structure, and phonics for struggling readers.
    IRIS Reads demo
    • C#
    • Unity

  • Jul 2021 - May 2023

    Research Assistant · Dost · UMD GAMMA Lab

    College Park, MD

    • Prototyped Dost, a real-time conversational AI assistant with multimodal gesture and facial generation in C++/Unreal Engine.
    Dost demo
    • C++
    • Unreal Engine

  • Jan 2022 - May 2022

    Teaching Assistant · CMSC838C · UMD CS

    College Park, MD

    • Supported graduate XR coursework under Dr. Ming Lin: lesson planning, grading, and student guidance in CMSC838C: Advances in XR.
    • Unity
    • C#

  • Oct 2021 - Dec 2021

    Research Mentee · Google CSRMP

    Remote

    • Completed a 4-month CS research mentorship under Google Researcher Mike Mozer.
    • Studied research-problem framing in education innovation, HCI, and visualization.
    • Prototyped encoding variability, eye-tracking, and soft highlighting for educational VR in Unity/C#.
    • C#
    • Unity

  • May 2021 - Aug 2021

    Certified Virtual Instructor · iD Tech

    Remote

    • Taught Unity, Python, Java, and video design to 50+ students via personalized remote STEM lessons.
    • Unity
    • Python
    • Java

  • Aug 2023 - Dec 2025

    Graduate Teaching Assistant · Purdue CS

    West Lafayette, IN

    • Mentored 120+ students across four semesters in labs and office hours for Purdue intro CS and foundations courses.
    • Taught CS 18000, CS 25100, and CS 18200 (Java, data structures, discrete math/proofs).
    • Java

Projects & leadership

  • Aug 2023 - May 2026

    Lead Contributor · Purdue IDEAS Lab · MDD: Multimodal Dataset

    • Co-led MDD, the largest text/music/motion duet-dance dataset (10.34 hrs, 15 genres), with multimodal capture and 10K+ SMPL-X annotations.
    • Built a Python capture pipeline and benchmarked MDM, InterGen, and Duolando on FID and beat-alignment.
    ICCV 2025Outstanding Paper

    MDD: A Dataset for Text-and-Music Conditioned Duet Dance Generation

    Gupta, P., J. A. Fotso-Puepi (2nd author), Z. Li, J. Mehta, and A. Bera

    Multimodal dataset and baselines for text-and-music conditioned duet dance generation.

    MDD Dataset Presentation | ICCV 2025
    ICCV 2025 Outstanding Paper certificate for MDD
    • Python
    • SMPL-X
    • CLIP
    • Librosa
    • OptiTrack

  • 2026

    Builder · Pixel Garage

    • Mobile "Pokédex for cars": photograph real cars, collect shared pixel-art sprites in an Expo React Native app.
    • Server-side scan pipeline via Firebase Cloud Functions, Replicate vision/FLUX, Sharp pixelation, and Firestore caching.
    • Marketing site at pixel-garage.app on Next.js and Cloudflare Workers.
    Pixel Garage promo
    • TypeScript
    • Expo
    • React Native
    • Firebase
    • Cloud Functions
    • Replicate
    • Next.js
    • Cloudflare

  • 2021 - 2023

    President · XR Club at UMD

    • Grew a 300+ member community (600+ on Discord) and led a 15+ officer team.
    • Partnered with UMD CS, Immersive Media Design, and Break Through Tech; hosted 30+ AR/VR/WebXR workshops.
    • Advanced NASA SUITS proposal to finalist status with TerpVISIO demos.
    • Secured university funding for lab access and equipment.
    TerpVISIO NASA SUITS introduction
    TerraSpatial demo
    • Unity
    • Unreal Engine
    • WebXR
    • HoloLens

Education

  • Purdue University

    M.S. in Computer Science · 2024 GEM Fellowship

    Aug 2023 - May 2026 · West Lafayette, IN

    Applied ML, cloud systems, human-centered product engineering

  • University of Maryland, College Park

    B.S. in Computer Science

    Aug 2021 - May 2023 · College Park, MD

  • Montgomery College

    A.A. in Computer Science · Early College Program

    Aug 2019 - May 2021 · Germantown, MD

    Founder & President, Chess Club

  • Languages: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, C#, HTML/CSS
  • Frameworks: React Native, Expo, Next.js, Node.js, Tailwind CSS, Unity, Unreal Engine, HLSL, XCode
  • AI / ML: PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, OpenCV
  • Cloud & Data: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Firebase, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub, Linux
  • Tools: Trello, Tableau, Agile, Scrum

Certifications

Contact

jason.a.fotso@gmail.com