Thomas A. DeFanti

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Tom DeFanti is a computer graphics researcher and pioneer. DeFanti did his PhD work in the early 1970s at Ohio State University, under Charles Csuri in the Computer Graphics Research Group. For his dissertation, he created the GRASS programming language.

In 1973, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago. With Dan Sandin, he founded the Circle Graphics Habitat, now known as the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). Some of the significant work done at EVL includes development of the graphics system for the Bally home computer, co-editing the 1987 NSF-sponsored report Visualization in Scientific Computing, invention of PHSColograms, and invention of the CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment.

DeFanti contributed greatly to the growth of the SIGGRAPH organization and conference. He served as Chair of the group from 1981 to 1985, co-organized early film and video presentations (which became the Electronic Theatre), and in 1979 started the SIGGRAPH Video Review, a video archive of computer graphics research.

DeFanti is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received the 1988 ACM Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2000 SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award, and the UIC Inventor of the Year Award.