Join us for the first Food For Thought event of the season. Featuring Carmen Hull (Art + Design / Architecture) and Rahul Bhargava (Journalism / Art + Design). Each Faculty member will share a short presentation about their research and lunch will be served!

Rahul Bhargava is an educator, researcher, designer, and facilitator who builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes. He has created big data research tools to investigate media attention, built hands-on interactive museum exhibits that delight learners of all ages, and run over 100 workshops to build data culture in newsrooms, non-profits, and libraries. Rahul has collaborated with a wide range of groups, from the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil to the St. Paul library system and the World Food Program. His academic work on data literacy, technology, and civic media has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Community Informatics, and been presented at conferences such as IEEE Vis and ICWSM. His museum installations have appeared at the Boston Museum of Science, Eyebeam in New York City, and the Tech Interactive in San Jose.

Dr. Carmen Hull is an Assistant Professor of Information Design and Data Visualization with a joint appointment in the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Architecture. She takes inspiration from her background in film and architecture to make physical and immersive data visualizations and tools, emphasizing generative design, visual cognition, and information visualization principles. She received her PhD at the University of Calgary in Computational Media Design and has taught in art, engineering, human computer interaction, and data science departments. Previous work on large-scale urban design and architectural projects inspired her research on immersive data visualizations that leverage our inherent spatial intelligence and embodied sensemaking abilities. Her projects included a 3D interactive tabletop model visualizing energy use data for a university campus, a patented generative design extension for Tableau Software, and a large-scale installation visualizing global gender gap statistics that is slated for exhibition at the UN in Geneva in 2023. Carmen is a recipient of the prestigious AITF scholarship and has presented her research at CHI, VIS, and the Women in Data Science event. She has been profiled in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and was selected an Innovator for Change in 2021. Her work has been published in top-tier journals such as ACM SIGCHI, IEEE VIS, and CG+A Journals. Her current research directions include generative and machine learning systems for data visualization, spatial intelligence and visual cognition, and telling stories with data through multiple modalities, domains, and scales.