Local Kine AI
AI literacy, from the islands.
Free workshops and webinars for Pacific Islander and island communities — practical, culturally grounded AI literacy, on our terms.
Local Kine AI projects & talks
Designing CHARLIE — Translating Federal Health Data into Community-Ready Insight
CHARLIE (Community Health Analytics & Responsive Learning Intelligence Engine) is a mobile-first, AI-powered platform I independently designed and built in 2025, over a fixed pre-accelerator program period, to translate federal public health data into plain-language insight for non-technical users — building on a concept a colleague originally proposed in a different technical form.
I took an idea a colleague originally developed — proposed to an outside AI grant program in a resource-intensive, fine-tuned-model form that ultimately wasn't funded — and independently designed and built an entirely different implementation using Bubble's no-code platform and Anthropic's Claude API directly. Completing Bubble's Immerse pre-accelerator program gave the project structured mentorship as I refined it; once the program period ended, the ongoing cost of running an unfunded, solo-maintained no-code app outpaced what made sense for me to sustain, and the engineers who maintain HET itself have since carried the API-integration approach forward into HET's own infrastructure. I chose Anthropic's Claude API specifically because, in a health equity context, algorithmic bias can determine who gets diagnosed, treated, or overlooked — making AI-provider selection itself a trust and equity decision for the users I designed for.
Voicing the Data: Partnering with ElevenLabs to Make Health Equity Guides Accessible
In October 2024, the Health Equity Tracker team was accepted into ElevenLabs' Impact Partner Program, which gave us a complimentary year of their Creator plan — 100,000 voice-AI credits a month — in exchange for featuring their logo and tagging them once on social media. We used it to add narrated audio to our "How to Use the Data" guide series, starting with a Gun Violence-focused walkthrough of HET's core visualizations.
A partnership with ElevenLabs' Impact Program brought AI-generated narration to the Health Equity Tracker's "How to Use the Data" guides — starting with a Gun Violence–focused series walking users through each visualization type, using real Georgia data on Black male gun homicide rates to make the how-to concrete.
WiUX Conference Speaking Engagement — "Stay Woke, Be an A11y"
Women in UX (WiUX) at the University of Washington invited Kim to speak at their 7th Annual Conference on May 8th, 2021. The theme, "Learning Through Design," aimed to address how design can be iterative, inclusive, and drive social impact. WiUX sought speakers who could bridge professional expertise with lived experience to inspire 300+ virtual attendees.
Kim delivered a 15-minute keynote on accessibility and inclusive design, followed by 10 minutes of audience Q&A. Drawing on her background as a sociologist, former foster youth advocate, military veteran with a service-connected disability, and LGBTQIA+ person of color, she reframed disability not as a personal problem but as a reflection of human diversity that strengthens design practice. She presented the concept "Solve for One, Extend to Many" (inspired by Microsoft's inclusive design framework) and shared practical tools (a11y checklist, WAVE evaluation, Self Defined) to help designers implement accessibility in workflows.
General Assembly Software Engineering Immersive Lightning Talk on Accessibility
General Assembly built lightning talks into the SEI curriculum as a chance for students to teach the cohort something outside the syllabus. This was my first time ever giving this talk — to the classmates and instructors I'd spend twelve hours a day with until graduation — before I brought an expanded version to Women in UX at the University of Washington two months later.
A first-run lightning talk to my General Assembly SEI cohort on accessibility and inclusive design, drawing on my background as a sociologist, disability advocate, and Navy veteran. The response gave me the confidence to bring a fuller version of this talk to Women in UX at the University of Washington that May.