Hi, I'm Vivek! (he/him)

that's [ viv-ake ]

I'm passionate about analyzing and telling stories with data.

About me

I create data visualizations, dashboards, websites, and digital tools that communicate complex ideas in simple ways.

I believe in taking a user-centered approach when visualizing data. This involves lots of research, testing, and rapid prototyping. I'm a huge fan of cross-functional collaboration between designers and developers. I'm comfortable using Figma, d3.js, React, Tableau, PowerBI, Python, SQL, the Adobe Creative Suite, and more.

Outside of work, I'm passionate about biking, painting, journalism and ethical AI. Reach out to me if you'd like to chat about those things or about any of my projects below.

Awards

Winner, visual and data-driven story: Pudding Cup 2024

Longlist | Leisure, Games, and Sport: Information is Beautiful Awards 2024

First place, data visualization: Society of Professional Journalists

First/third place, interactive graphic: Columbia Scholastic Press Association

First place, best journalism website: Indiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists

Data visualization:

Using analytics and visualization to find patterns in how I solve the sudoku

Figma Python React d3.js

This is a data-driven essay I wrote to analyze how I fill out the New York Times sudoku. For this piece, I created a browser extension to track how I fill the Times grid, built out a server to collect data, wrote Python notebooks for analysis, and used d3.js + React for data viz.

This piece won the Pudding Cup in 2024. Take a look at the entire repo here.


Supporting a health agency monitor 300+ nursing homes through data viz

Figma user testing Tableau AWS Python

I worked with a designer and a Tableau developer to help create two dashboards for a health agency. I designed and conducted user research for an internal dashboard that the agency uses to identify nursing homes that need intervention.

I also used AWS and Python to create a data pipeline that populated the dashboards. Read more about my design and development process here.


Examining donations across the United States through a racial equity lens

scrollytelling Flourish cartography


Using data to uncover a fountain wasting 10 million gallons of water annually

data analysis dashboarding Mapbox


Clean freaks, night owls and Laundrygate: How IU does its laundry

cron jobs web scraping Plot.ly

Visualizing a 12th-century manuscript to understand Vedic units of time and astronomy
Are some NYC neighborhoods likelier to have poor energy ratings?
Data science:

Training GPT-2 to simulate, analyze outgoing IU president McRobbie's speeches

fine-tuning LLMs scikit-learn nltk web scraping

Trained and fine-tuned OpenAI's GPT-2 Large Language Model (LLM) to simulate speeches and also visualized insights through responsive graphics.

This piece was recognized for its storytelling and sparked a conversation in 2019 on the use of LLMs to spread (mis)information.


What's the quickest way to bike to all 81 Chicago Public Library branches?

optimization geojson


Quantifying the impact of different teaching styles on students during the COVID-19 pandemic

dimension reduction project management

Digital stories:

IU found a professor sexually harassed a freshman, allowed him to continue teaching

creative direction deadlines responsive web layouts


Redesigning the Indiana Daily Student's website

project management Adobe tools responsive web layouts

Data engineering:

Creating Indiana's first COVID-19 tracker—even before the health department

Python cartography data viz