• Welcome!

    I'm an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Seattle University. Before joining SU, I was in the Social Spaces group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Karrie Karahalios.

    My research interests are in data visualization and assistive technology. I design, build, and evaluate interactive systems to study people’s perceptions and usage of data visualization in various domains including healthcare and the media. My latest research projects looked at credibility and trust in visualization online, and how visualization can help clinicians and parents of young children communicate more efficiently.
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What have I written?

Publications

H. Kong and K. Karahalios. Addressing Cognitive and Emotional Barriers in Parent-Clinician Communication through Behavioral Visualization Webtools, CHI 2020.

H. Kong, W. Zhu, Z. Liu, and K. Karahalios. Understanding Visual Cues in Visualizations Accompanied by Audio Narrations, CHI 2019. pdf

H. Kong, Z. Liu, and K. Karahalios. Trust and Recall of Information across Varying Degrees of Title-Visualization Misalignment, CHI 2019. pdf

H. Kong, Z. Liu, and K. Karahalios. Frames and Slants in Titles of Visualizations on Controversial Topics, CHI 2018. pdf

H. Kong*, J. Lee*, and K. Karrahalios. A Comparative Study of Visualizations with Different Granularities of Behavior for Communicating about Autism, CSCW 2018. pdf
*Both authors contributed equally to this work

S. Rahman, M. Aliakbarpour, H. Kong, E. Blais, K. Karahalios, A. Parameswaran, and R. Rubinfield. I’ve Seen “Enough”: Incrementally Improving Visualizations to Support Rapid Decision Making, VLDB 2017. pdf

H. Kong, Z. Liu, and K. Karahalios. Internal and External Visual Cue Preferences for Visualizations in Presentations, EuroVis 2017. pdf

H. Kong, K. Karahalios. Parental Perceptions, Experiences, and Desires of Music Therapy, AMIA 2016. pdf

J. Lee, H. Kong, S. Lin, K. Karahalios. Plexlines: Tracking Socio-communicative Behaviors Using Timeline Visualizations, AMIA 2016. pdf

H. Kong*, J. Lee*, J. Ding, K. Karahalios. EnGaze: Designing Behavior Visualizations with and for Behavioral Scientists, DIS 2016. pdf

J. Kim, H. Kong, K. Karahalios, W. Fu, and H. Hong. The Power of Collective Endorsements: Credibility Factors in Medical Crowdfunding Campaigns, CHI 2016. pdf

H. Kong, W. Wu, B. Bailey, and K. Karahalios. Culture, Imagined Audience, and Language Choices of Multilingual Chinese and Korean Students on Facebook, SocInfo 2015. pdf

What/where have I learned?

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • PhD in Computer Science (Aug 2019)
  • Advisor: Karrie Karahalios

Calvin College - Grand Rapids, MI

  • BS with Honors in Computer Science (May 2013)
  • Advisor: Serita Neleson

Calvin College - Grand Rapids, MI

  • BA with Honors in Music (May 2013)
  • Advisor: Hyesook Kim
What have I worked on?

Research Projects

Family Behavior Support App

We hope to support families of young children with challenging behavior through this project. The Family Behavior Support App provides strategies to prevent and address children’s challenging behaviors at home.

Plexlines & EnGaze

We present a system to visualize the annotations of videos of children engaged in a 3-5 minute interactive protocol that assesses communicative behavior, the Rapid ABC. Rapid ABC session videos are annotated to capture important developmental indicators for a young child. From these annotations, we create a graphical fingerprint for each session.

Visual Cues

Visual cues highlight specific parts of a visualization to guide the audience’s attention. We study the types and uses of visual cues that facilitate visualization storytelling and presentation. We found that in general, visual cues did not have a significant effect on learning outcomes, but for specific cue techniques (e.g. glow) or specific chart types (e.g heatmap), cues significantly improved comprehension.

The Power of Collective Endorsements: Credibility Factors in Medical Crowdfunding Campaigns

We investigated how potential donors assess credibility of medical crowdfunding campaigns and identified eleven factors that affect the perceived credibility of a campaign. Three of them were communicative/emotional factors that were unique to medical crowdfunding.

Language Choices of Multilingual Students on Facebook

We found that Chinese and Korean students choose a language on SNS to divide and filter their imagined audience. Culture played two contrasting roles; users wanted to share their culture in English but share their emotions in their native language. Through this work, we hope to portray language choice not as a tool for exclusion but of consideration for the potential audience and adherence to one's culture.

Parental Perceptions, Experiences, and Desires of Music Therapy

We explored the landscape of music therapy and existing challenges that lead to the underuse of music therapy. Contrary to the public perception that music therapy only addresses emotional needs, most participants reported seeing improvements in other areas including behavioral, cognitive, linguistic, and social changes.