Mara Ocie Kaisa Solen

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia (UBC) working with Professor Tamara Munzner.

My research interests focus on how everyday people interact with data, typically through presentation: the communication of already-gleaned data. My interests lead to work in domains such as museums and fitness groups to understand and improve how we visually communicate information.

I completed my B.Sc. in Honours Computer Science with Distinction at UBC in 2021.

Publications

DeLVE into Earth’s Past: A Visualization-Based Exhibit Deployed Across Multiple Museum Contexts. Mara Solen, Nigar Sultana, Laura Lukes, Tamara Munzner. TVCG, proc. VIS 2024. Available on IEEE Xplore, arxiv.
Scoping the Future of Visualization Literacy: A Review. Mara Solen. VisComm Workshop at VIS 2022. Available on OSF.

Teaching

CPSC 447 (prev: CPSC 436V). Teaching Assistant. January 2022 - (ongoing).

UBC Computer Based Testing Facility. Proctor and Coordinator. September 2022 - October 2024.

CPSC 547. Teaching Assistant. September 2022 - December 2022.

UBC Extended Learning: Foundations of Software Development. Course Facilitator. April 2021 - December 2022.

CPSC 110. Teaching Assistant then Lead Teaching Assistant. September 2017 - December 2021.

CPSC 210. Teaching Assistant. July 2020 - August 2020.

Industry Employment

Tableau. Software Engineer Intern. June 2021 - August 2021.

Activision. Software Engineer Intern. May 2019 - July 2019.

Intel. Firmware Engineer Intern. January 2018 - August 2018.

Awards and Scholarships

British Columbia Graduate Scholarship. $17,500. May 2022.

Best CPSC 554K Student Project Award. May 2022.

Bill Aiello Award. $3050. May 2021. Article.

Designs

Various things I have designed!

DeLVE: Deep-time Literacy Visualization Exhibit

Designers: Mara Solen, Nigar Sultana, Laura Lukes, Tamara Munzner

DeLVE is a visualization system designed for use as a museum exhibit. It visualizes data from past events on different scales with the intention of helping museum visitors improve their proportional reasoning skills.

See the live demo here, the open-source repository here, and the associated paper here!

Actor Adaptability

Designers: Mara Solen, Ethan Tam, Ian Del Rio

Actor Adaptability is a visualization that showcases actors' flexibility and ability to act in multiple genres using data from the top 1000 movies of the last decade. The main view is a network diagram that shows all the actors of the dataset and the genres they tend to act in. Viewers can use this to see how actors compare against each other in the number of movies and diversity of genres they have been in.

See the live demo here!

UBC InfoVis Group Website

Designers: Mara Solen + all past web tzars!

I converted the old website to Jekyll and updated the stylings.

See the website here!

This Website

Designer: Mara Solen

I like drawing aesthetic design inspiration from nature. The colours for this website were sampled from the photo below.

See the website source on GitHub!

Personal

I have a cat whom I sometimes take outside. I like boxing, playing soccer, watching movies, and cooking. I have lots of tattoos and like to change my hair colour every few months.