Hyeok Kim

Hi, I'm Hyeok Kim (hjʌk). I'm a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Northwestern University. Currently, I work with Professor Jessica Hullman at MU Collective. Previously, I did my masters in Communcation at Seoul National University with colleagues from HCI+D Lab. My research intersts mainly include 📊 data visualization, 📱🖥 responsive visualization and multi-context visualizations, 🛠 visualization system, formalization, and automation, 📜 narrative and communicative visualization, and 🧙🏻‍♂design research for societal problems. If you are interested in these areas as well, please feel free to contact me for collaboration 🙆🏻‍♂!

More background

I studied Linguistics for my undergraduate major, and Computational and Statistical Linguistics for my student-designed minor. Data visualization was my way to practice programming and statistics together—this was indeed a great approach and led me to various areas in HCI, including system design, visualization grammar, and design research. I am a first-generation PhD student.

I have published papers on data visualization and design research in top HCI venues.

Responsive Visualization Authoring

Data visualization helps us to reason about various problems from daily decisions to professional judgment. As different types of devices have become affordable to many people, we face more and more visualization use cases through diverse device types. I have studied "responsive visualization," referring to adpating visualizations for different device types.

I particularly focus on responsive visualization authoring, which is not easy because of the lack of guidance in addition to challenges in managing multiple versions of charts. A first step to intelligent responsive visualization authoring systems is to undertstand a snapshot of current practices and trade-offs occuring around those practices. Analyzing 378 pairs of desktop and mobile versions of communicative visualizations, our work identifies a set of 76 design patterns and characterize designing responsive visualization as density-message trade-off between adjusting graphical density and maintaining visualization insights. To facilitate reasoning about insight preservation in an automated way, we contribute task-oriented insight preservation measures in terms of identification, comparison, and trend insights. More recently, we introduce, Cicero, a declarative grammar for responsive visualization to better support related authoring systems.

Publication

Hyeok Kim, Dominik Moritz, & Jessica Hullman. 2021. Design patterns and trade-offs in responsive visualization for communication. Computer Graphics Forum (EUROVIS 2021). Preprint. Online gallery for responsive visualization. Supplemental material.

Hyeok Kim, Ryan Rossi, Abhraneel Sarma, Dominik Moritz, & Jessica Hullman. 2021. An Automated Approach to Reasoning About Task-Oriented Insights in Responsive Visualization. IEEE TVCG (VIS 2021). Preprint. Supplemental material.

Hyeok Kim, Ryan Rossi, Fan Du, Eunyee Koh, Shunan Guo, Jessica Hullman, & Jane Hoffswell. 2022. Cicero: A Declarative Grammar for Responsive Visualization. ACM CHI 2022. Preprint. Online gallery for Cicero grammar. Supplemental material.

Design for Societal Problems

Designign for the underrepresetned helps us to communicate better as a community. Nevertheless, not every computing device or system is useful for the underrepresetned. I am particularly interested in how an understnading of a user group impacts the design of a system at a deeper level.

Information System for Sexual Violence Survivors

For example, sexual violence survivors often have hard time finding suitable support services for them due to various societal and personal reasons. While personalization is key to navigate a vast search space of support-seeking, how to personalize (i.e., how to ask for personalization and how to provide personalized information) has been less asked given its importance. To understand personalization in a conversational interaction setting, we performed a co-design workshop with experts, implemented a high-fidelity prototype system, and did a user study with self-identified sexual violence survivors.

Publication

Hyeok Kim, Youjin Hwang, Jieun Lee, Youngjin Kwon, Yujin Park, & Joonhwan Lee. 2022. Personalization Trade-offs in Designing a Dialogue-based Information System for Support-Seeking of Sexual Violence Survivors. ACM CHI 2022. Preprint.
Supplemental material.

Design Guidelines for the In-game Sexual Harassment Prevention System

In online video games, sexual harassment against female gamers frequently occurs, and becomes worse with various factors. This research projects attempted to suggest design guidelines that both prevent harrassment. A shor paper for this project was published in HCI Korea 2018 Conference (extended abstract). Download Preprint (Korean)

Media-as-Place Storytelling

From escape rooms to Sara is Missing... and Searching..., we experience a new kind of narratives where their places seem identical to their media: real objects in escape rooms, a smartphone for Sara is Missing..., and a computer for Searching.... We shed light on this emerging storytelling technique by identifying it as 'Media-as-Place' storytelling. This approach will enhance place-based learning of HCI as well as enriching our digital narrtaive techniques.

The implementation of MiRO, a Media-as-Place computer game

This is an initial approach to explicate the idea of Media-as-Place storytelling. This work-in-progress was presented on at 2019 (extended abstract link, Download Preprint). The game is available via here.

Data visualization projects

Explore them here!

Web development projects

SNU FactCheck

SNU FactCheck is a news portal that aggregates factchecks from (initially) 27 media outlets. This is serviced by SNU Institue for Communication Research and collaborated with Naver. (link)

SNU Card NewsBot

SNU Card NewsBot is a robot journalism system that automatically generates personalized news slides. This was funded by Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion of South Korea. (link)

Utopia

Utopia is a web app for energy education. My team developed user-side and content provider-side apps. The user-side app features an energy diary, a web comics with audio autoplay, and a book viewer system, and the content provider-side app offers functinalities to support those features.(link)

Link (last updated: May 11, 2023)

Email: hyeokkim2024 [at] u.northwestern.edu
Twitter: @hyeok__kim
Mastodon: vis.social/@hyeokkim