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 Communication at Seoul National University with colleagues from HCI+D Lab.

My research interests include

• 📊 data visualization,
• 📱🖥 responsive visualization and multi-context visualization
• 🛠 visualization system, formalization, and automation,
• 📜 narrative and communicative visualization, and
• 🧙🏻‍♂design research for societal problems.

If you are interested in these areas as well, 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 led exciting research projects that are close to the domain fields and 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. We face more and more visualization use cases through diverse device types (mobile phones, desktops). To enable seamless support for visualizations on different devices, I have studied "responsive visualization," referring to adapting visualizations for different device types.

Authoring responsive visualizations is not easy because it is hard to manage multiple versions and every individual creators have a full set of relevant knowledge. Thus, I took a "mixed-initiative" (= automated recommendation + human customization) approach to support responsive visualization authoring. This took an extensive path: understanding current practices and tradeoffs, formalizing loss measures for preserving task-oriented insights between responsive versions, formalizing responsive transformations (Cicero grammar), and an interface for mixed-initiative responsive visualization authoring.

Publication

Hyeok Kim, Ryan Rossi, Jane Hoffswell, & Jessica Hullman. 2023. Dupo: A Mixed-initiative Authoring Tool for Responsive Visualization. IEEE VIS 2023. Preprint. Public Demo. Supplemental material. Video Demo.

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.

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, 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.

Data Sonification

Referring to mappings from data variables (e.g., temperature, price) to auditory variables (e.g., pitch, time), data sonification (or audio graph) represents data using sound. Sonification is used for immersive storytelling for online articles and museum settings, scientific observations, and accessible visualization. As an emerging field, we need a better understanding of sonification design in terms of intuitiveness and effectiveness. A first step toward it is an expressive toolkit that can produce a variety of data sonification designs. Thus, I developed Erie, a declarative grammar for data sonification. Next steps inlucde further empirical exploratory studies in identifying intuitive and effective audio graph designs for different tasks relating to data, such as recognizing distribution and uncertainty.

Publication

Hyeok Kim, Yea-Seul Kim, & Jessica Hullman. 2024. Erie: A Declarative Grammar for Data Sonification. ACM CHI 2024. Preprint (Interactive article). Software (via NPM). Editor. Documentation.

Design for Societal Problems

Designing for the underrepresented helps us to grow better as a community. My interest is bridging what underrepresented groups need to how a system—beyond user interface—is designed, implemented, and deployed.

Information System for Sexual Violence Survivors

Sexual violence survivors often have a hard time finding suitable support services due to various societal and personal constraints. While personalization is key to navigating 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 conducted a co-design workshop with experts, implemented a high-fidelity prototype system, and interviewed 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.

Mental Health of Informal Caregivers for People with Dementia

Informal caregivers (e.g., family) of people with dementia often face physical and mental struggles, and managing stress plays an important role in keeping the sustainability of caregiving. For example, a common source of mental stress is enduring verbal agitation, such as swearing and yelling, made by people with dementia. In this paper (preprint), we identify design opportunities in supporting mental health of informal dementia caregivers who suffer from verbal agitation. This work will be presented at ACM CSCW 2024.

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 project attempts to suggest design guidelines that both prevent harassment. A short paper on 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 narrative 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 enrich our digital narrative techniques.

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

This game demonstrates the idea of Media-as-Place storytelling. This work was presented at DIS 2019 Work-in-Progress track.

Publication

Hyeok Kim, Haesoo Kim, Youngjin Kwon, Hansol Jang, SooMin Lee, & Joonhwan Lee. 2019. ACM DIS Work-inProgress. Preprint. Game demo (English/Korean).

Data visualization projects

Explore them here!

Web development projects

SNU FactCheck

SNU FactCheck is a news portal that aggregates fact-checks 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, webcomics with audio autoplay, and a book viewer system, and the content provider-side app offers functionalities to support those features. (link)

Link

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