Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti (born September 18, 1948) is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer.
He is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
[3] For his dissertation, he created the GRASS programming language, a three-dimensional, real-time animation system usable by computer novices.
[4] In 1973, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and with Daniel J. Sandin, he founded the Circle Graphics Habitat, now known as the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL).
[5] At UIC, DeFanti further developed the GRASS language, and later created an improved version, ZGRASS, implemented on the low-cost Datamax UV-1.