Hannah K. Bako

I'm a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the university of Maryland, College Park. I currently work with Dr. Zhicheng (Leo) Liu in the Human Data Interaction Group. My research interests lies at the intersection of data visualization, human-computer interaction and design, where I focus on discovering how to inspire and support creativity in visualization design. I'm particularly interested in understanding how people conceptualize and implement design ideas and using that knowledge to develop tools that empower people to bring their ideas to life. In the past, I focused on developing intuitive tools to support visualization programming and design in D3 with Dr. Leilani Battle. I also have an MSc in Software engineering from Stevens institute of Technology and a BSc in Computer Information Systems from Babcock University.

I'm on the academic job market this year. Please reach out to me about potential opportunities or collaborations.

Publications

Peer Reviewed Papers

Unveiling How Examples Shape Visualization Design Outcomes

IEEE VIS 2024 | Paper | OSF

Hannah K. Bako,Xinyi Liu, Grace Ko, Hyemi Song, Leilani Battle & Zhicheng Liu

Evaluating the Semantic Profiling Abilities of LLMs for Natural Language Utterances in Data Visualization

IEEE VIS 2024 | Paper | Code

Hannah K. Bako, Arshnoor Buthani, Xinyi Liu, Kwesi Cobbina & Zhicheng Liu

User-Driven Support for Visualization Prototyping in D3

ACM IUI 2023 | Paper | Demo

Hannah K. Bako, Alisha Varma, Anuoluwapo Faboro, Mahreen Haider, Favour Nerrise, Bissaka Kenah, John Dickerson, & Leilani Battle

Understanding how Designers Find and Use Data Visualization Examples

IEEE VIS 2022 | Paper | OSF

Hannah K. Bako, Xinyi Liu, Leilani Battle, & Zhicheng Liu

Streamlining Visualization Authoring in D3 Through User-Driven Templates

IEEE VIS 2022 | Paper | OSF

Hannah K. Bako, Alisha Varma, Anuoluwapo Faboro, Mahreen Haider, Favour Nerrise, Bissaka Kenah, & Leilani Battle

Workshop Papers and Pre-Prints

Tweets and Social Network Data for Twitter

SBP-BRiMS 2021t | Paper

Jennifer Golbeck, Niloofarsadat Alavi, Hannah K. Bako, Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay, Calvin Bao, Matthew Barzola, Corie Brown, Kristen M. Byers, [et.al].

How do Observable Users Decompose D3 Code? An Exploratory Study

Arxiv | Paper

Melissa Lin, Heer Patel, Medina Lamkin, Tukey Tu, Hannah K. Bako, Soham Raut, Leilani Battle

VisAnatomy: An SVG Chart Corpus with Fine-Grained Semantic Labels

Arxiv | Paper

Chen Chen, Hannah K. Bako, Peihong Yu, John Hooker, Jeffrey Joyal, Simon C. Wang, Samuel Kim, Jessica Wu, Aoxue Ding, Lara Sandeep, Alex Chen, Chayanika Sinha, Zhicheng Liu

Professional

Expericence

Industry

User Research Intern

Tableau | Summer 2022

Conduct studies improve the user experience through understanding the content consumption behaviour of users. Used results to profile active users and understand the analytical needs of business users in the Tableau ecosystem.
Mentor: Bruce Phillips

Design & Visualization Intern

Apple Inc. | Summer 2021

Collaborate with broader teams across Apple to research and develop innovative ML strategies for challenging problems that will affect future Apple products
Mentor: Donghao Ren

Graduate Assistant

Systems Engineering Research Center | Sep 2017 - May 2019

Developed a web-based data collection and processing tool for the World Wide Directory, a public a resource for the industrial and systems engineering community as a joint effort of the SERC and INCOSE council.

Android UX Developer

NHub Nigeria | Jan 2017 - Jul 2017

Involved in the implementation of scalable software systems for clients. Collaborated with domain experts to research, design and implement applications that solve real-world problems

Teaching

Teaching Assistant

Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland | 2019 - Present

Teach students core CS and HCI content related to courses. Manage projects on various programming and data science concepts e.g Hadoop and statistical analysis.

CMSC 471 - Introduction to Data Visualization (Multiple Semesters)
CMSC 434 - Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (Fall 2022)
CMSC 320 - Introduction to Data Science (Summer 2020)
CMSC 433 - Programming Languages and Paradigms (Multiple Semesters)