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UC San Diego + California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology

Thomas A. DeFanti

Research Scientist, QI

Thomas A. DeFanti, Ph.D., is a research scientist at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute/Calit2, and a distinguished professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).  He received the 1988 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Outstanding Contribution Award, became an ACM fellow in 1994, and was presented the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Ohio State University (where he received his Ph.D.) in 2018. 

From 1973 to 2004, Tom and video and UIC colleague Dan Sandin founded and built the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory to support what would become 44 grad students and 10 staff and faculty members by the 1990s. They  conceived the CAVE virtual reality theater in 1991. Tom started working with Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, in 1986 as the first National Center for Supercomputing Applications visiting computer science researcher, and became associate director for visualization and virtual reality there in the 1990s. Larry hired Maxine Brown to work with Tom on the 1992 SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics where the CAVE was introduced, as well as 45Mb/s telescience from Chicago to UC San Diego. To support this, Joe Mambretti, Tom, and Maxine Brown founded StarLight in Chicago; it is still the world’s largest and most advanced international Research and Education Internet Exchange.

Since moving in 2005 to UC San Diego to join Calit2, Tom and artist Greg Dawe designed and built the StarCAVE, NexCAVE, WAVE, and SunCAVE VR systems. Currently, Tom, John Graham, and Jon Paden are heading up the team constructing the Alternate Reality Network Observatory, a metaverse experiment to manage Calit2/Qualcomm Institute’s global-scale real-time supercomputer called Nautilus. 

Tom has continued his funded research in national and international high-performance networking with Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC). With Larry Smarr, John Graham, Dima Mishin, Isaac Nealey, Igor Sfiligoi, Phil Papadopoulos, Tom designs, builds, and manages 100/400Gbps state-of-the-art wide-area computer networked computing, storage, machine learning/graphics processing and visualization facilities to serve advanced scientific and artistic computing communities. He is co-principal investigator (PI) of the new Prototype National Research Platform Cat-II award (Frank Wuerthwein, PI) for machine learning, and is PI of the CHASE-CI: Enhance and Sustain award, as well as the UC San Diego PI for a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to CENIC. The overall goal of all this research is creating a global-scale potluck supercomputer called Nautilus; it currently has ~200 nodes on >20 campuses contributed primarily by collaborating faculty.  

Tom has been an internationally recognized expert in interactive computer graphics since the early 1970s. He has amassed a number of credits, including the use of UIC/Electronic Visualization Laboratory hardware and software for the computer animations produced by Larry Cuba for the 1977 “Star Wars” movie, and contributor and co-editor, with Bruce McCormick and Maxine Brown, of the 1987 NSF-sponsored report “Visualization in Scientific Computing.” Realizing that high-bandwidth advanced networking was key to creating immersive televisualization experiences by linking CAVEs, Tom became information architect for Supercomputing’95 to learn the technology, and, as a result, he became one of several USA technical advisors to the G7 Global Interoperability of Broadband Network activity in early 1996 that led to the extraordinary ramp up of international networking we now enjoy. Tom served four years on the Internet2 founding Board of Directors (1997-2001) and led the first Applications Strategy Council during that period. 

To date, Tom’s total NSF and other federal/state/private funding at UIC and UC San Diego as PI or significant co-PI is over $100 million. Tom has also been active in the ACM SIGGRAPH organization and in the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing conferences. Current and past activities include: secretary of SIGGRAPH (1977-1981); co-chair of the SIGGRAPH’79 conference; chair of the then 11,000-member SIGGRAPH organization (1981-1985); co-chair of the 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2005 iGrid conferences, and editor with UIC’s Dana Plepys of the “SIGGRAPH Video Review” video publication from 1979 to 2012.