Chi Vo

I turn complex data into clear, compelling visuals.

Currently at Columbia Journalism School
SELECTED WORKS
Past life as a visual designer

Commercial Work and Personal Projects

From AI to policy to food, data visualization, UI, and editorial design.
Duration: Five years
Skills: Adobe Package (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects), Flourish, Adobe XD, Figma, Inkscape, Excel, and visual storytelling.

The Bank That Robbed Itself

The Bank That Robbed Itself

Visual timeline and diagrams breaking down Vietnam's largest bank fraud. Investigated how $44B vanished through fake loans and shell firms. Duration: Two weeks
Storytelling • Illustration • Financial Analysis • Research • Editorial Design

Brewed, Branded, and Beige

Brewed, Branded, and Beige

Mapped the aesthetics and urban logic of 5,000+ cafés across 90 cities using AI vision, geospatial joins, and regression. Duration: Three weeks
Scraping • OCR • AI Captioning • Regression • Mapping • Design

Mercury's Literary Legacy

Mercury's Literary Legacy

Explored cultural bias in planetary naming. Scraped crater names, traced gender/ethnicity, and visualized global artistic legacy in space. Duration: One week
Scraping • Data Cleaning • Google Sheets • Illustrator • Writing

Broken Promises of Peace

Broken Promises of Peace

Built a React timeline exploring 300+ conflicts to test whether peace treaties actually end war. Duration: Two weeks
Data Analysis • React • Tailwind • UCDP • Visual Design • Writing

The Most Price-Inflated Item In America

The Most Price-Inflated Item In America

An illustrated explainer on Trump's proposed $5M 'Gold Card' visa, translating policy into Birkin bags, burgers, and years of retirement. Duration: Less than one week
Storytelling • Editorial Design • Illustrations • Datawrapper • HTML/CSS • ai2html

sentiment analysis of companion app

Loneliness and Liability: The Risks of Emotional Bonds with AI

Tested 5 AI companionship apps against suicide response standards; uncovered major safety failures and ethical blind spots. Duration: One month
Research • Rubric building • Testing Framework • Policy Reporting • Sentiment Analysis • Editorial Writing

Street view

Uptown's Dangerous Intersections: Can Technology Curtail Collisions?

Mapped 4,500+ collisions across Upper Manhattan using NYC Open Data and interviewed AI researchers on tech-led traffic safety. Duration: Two weeks
Investigative Reporting • Open Data • Geospatial Analysis • Interviewing • Urban Infrastructure

NYC free wifi

Free WiFi in NYC search

Mapped 3,000+ public Wi-Fi hotspots across NYC using cleaned open data and interactive search powered by Leaflet.js. Duration: One week
Data Cleaning • Leaflet.js • JavaScript • HTML/CSS • Front-End Mapping • Open Data

NYC free wifi

Recipe for a good joke

Analyzed 2,000+ human and AI-generated captions using embeddings, clustering, and humor trait labeling to decode what makes jokes work. Duration: Ongoing
NLP • Clustering • Zero-shot Classification • Humor Theory • D3.js • Scrollytelling

NYC Community Boards Scraper

NYC Community Boards Scraper

Built a Flask app that scrapes, parses, and centralizes 200+ PDF minutes from NYC community boards to support local journalism. Duration: Ongoing
Web Scraping • PDF Parsing • Flask • pdfplumber • HTML/CSS • Civic Data • Automation