Bio

Arnav Jhala is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. He joined the faculty in 2016 as part of the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster in Visual Narrative and serves as co-director of the Digital Games Research Initiative.

Jhala’s research focuses on computational methods for representing and mediating human interpretation and communication of narrative in interactive visual media, including film and games. His group develops symbolic and probabilistic models for visual discourse and applies generative techniques to support automated and collaborative creation of visual narratives. His past projects include games for exploring aesthetic preferences, studying expert gameplay and modeling gestural aesthetics in dance.

Before joining NC State, Jhala was a founding faculty member in the Department of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. He has held positions at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Duke TIP, Virtual Heroes Inc. and the Indian Space Research Organization’s Space Applications Center.

He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from NC State University and his B.E. in computer engineering from Gujarat University in India.

Appointments Calendar
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Area(s) of Expertise

Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents
Computer and Video Games
Graphics, Human Computer Interaction, and User Experience

Publications

• A Digital Program to Promote Sexual Communication Between Early Adolescents and Parents: Development and Acceptability Testing Results , The Journal of Sex Research (2025)
• Abstract 2353 Using Immersive Technologies to Teach Technical Skills in Biotechnology , Journal of Biological Chemistry (2025)
• Action-Dependent Optimality-Preserving Reward Shaping , (2025)
• GameTileNet: A Semantic Dataset for Low-Resolution Game Art in Procedural Content Generation , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (2025)
• Minding Motivation: The Effect of Intrinsic Motivation on Agent Behaviors , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (2025)
• Abstract 1497 Development and Evaluation of an Immersive and Interactive Virtual Cell Culture Training for Accessible Biotechnology , Journal of Biological Chemistry (2024)
• Student experiences with a molecular biotechnology course containing an interactive 3D immersive simulation and its impact on motivational beliefs , PLoS ONE (2024)
• Developing a Construction Domain–Specific Artificial Intelligence Language Model for NCDOT’s CLEAR Program to Promote Organizational Innovation and Institutional Knowledge , Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering (2023)
• A Digital Communication Twin for Addressing Misinformation: Vision, Challenges, Opportunities , IEEE Internet Computing (2022)
• Characterizing the perception of urban spaces from visual analytics of street-level imagery , AI & Society (2022)

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