KYLIE LIN
HCC PhD Student
Georgia Institute of Technology
klin368 [at] gatech [dot] edu
š° News
May 2025 šÆšµ @CHI-2025 ā Presented my LBW on Visual Complexity and attended the HEAL workshop!
May 2025 š Passed the HCC program Qualification Exam! On to third year we go :D
Oct. 2024 š Presented my poster and met some great folks at IEEE VIS 2024!
Oct. 2024 š« Presented my research on quantifying visual complexity at the training forum for Artificial and Human Intelligence at Schloss Dagstuhl.
May 2024 š» Started my summer internship with the Toyota Research Institute!
Nov. 2023 š Presented my poster on visual complexity, comprehension, and confidence at Psychonomics 2023 in SF.
Sept. 2023 
Started my first year in the HCC PhD program at Georgia Tech!
Hi, I'm Kylie!
Iām a second-year PhD student in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech. I work with the GT Visualization Lab and am advised by Cindy Xiong Bearfield.
In my work, I study how we can help people understand data and make informed decisions. I spend a lot of time thinking about how data visualizations can be designed to promote critical thinking and calibrated trust in viewers. Other endeavors I have been enjoying as of late include: comparing research methods against one another (e.g., in survey studies, should we capture subjective ratings through continous scales or forced-choice tasks?) and developing diagnostic survey question inventories for fellow human subjects researchers.
In the past, I have had the pleasure of collaborating with researchers at Toyota Research Institute, Tableau, Adobe, and Northwestern University (the Reading Comprehension Lab, Visual Thinking Lab, and Social Media Lab). I am also passionate about User Experience research and have worked in Automotive UX Research at SiriusXM.
Publications
What Makes a Visualization Visually Complex?
Kylie Lin, Sean Sheng-Tse Ru, David N. Rapp, Hui Guan, Cindy Xiong Bearfield
ACM CHI Extended Abstracts, 2025
PDF
LLMs Are Not Reliable Human Proxies to Study Affordances in Data Visualizations
Kylie Lin, Chase Stokes, Cindy Xiong Bearfield
HEAL@CHI, 2025
PDF
Visual Arrangements of Bar Charts Influence Comparisons in Viewer Takeaways
Cindy Xiong Bearfield, Vidya Setlur, Benjamin Bach, Kylie Lin, Eunyee Koh, Steven Franconeri
IEEE TVCG, 2021
PDFPosters
What Makes a Visualization Complex? Exploring Design Features Related to Visual Complexity
Kylie Lin, Sean Ru, David Rapp, Hui Guan, Cindy Xiong Bearfield
IEEE Visualization Conference, 2024
PDF
Does Visual Complexity Impact Reader Confidence and Comprehension of Data Visualizations?
Kylie Lin, David Rapp, Cindy Xiong Bearfield
Psychonomic Society, 2023
PDF
Attempts to Augment Refutation Text Benefits with Visualizations
Kylie Lin, Cindy Xiong Bearfield, David Rapp
Northwestern Undergraduate Research Exposition, 2022
PDFTeaching
Spring 2023
STAT 390: Data Science Project
Muntz Lassonde Undergraduate Teaching Assistant to Professor Lizhen Shi.
Winter 2022-23
STAT 302: Data Visualization
Muntz Lassonde Undergraduate Teaching Assistant to Professor Danielle Sass.
Fall 2021
COMM_ST 227: Communication and Technology
Undergraduate Peer Advisor to Professor Jeremy Birnholtz.
Winter 2021
COMM_ST 275: Persuasive Images: Rhetoric in Popular Culture
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant to Professor Irving Rein.
Awards
2023
Departmental Excellence Award for Undergraduate Students
by Northwestern Department of Communication Studies
2022
MinneAnalytics Scholarship, $500
by MinneAnalytics
2022
2nd Place, Women in Data Science Datathon, Chicago
by WiDS Chicago
2021
Cognitive Science Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, $3500
by Northwestern Cognitive Science Department
2021
Summer Undergraduate Research Grant, $3500 (awarded but declined)
by Northwestern University OUR
2021
1st Place, Northwestern Data Visualization Contest
by Northwestern University
2020
Finalist, McCormick Design-a-Thon
by Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering
2019
Clara Tao Memorial Scholarship
by Carlmont High School Swim Team
2017
National Merit Commended Scholar
by National Merit Scholarship Corporation
Employment
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
2020—2023
