You are cordially invited to the next IIC Colloquium March 31. ********************* Computational Information Design March 31, 2010, 4:00pm Room G-115, Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Ben Fry, design and software consultant, author and co-developer of Processing Abstract The ability to collect and store data continues to increase, but our ability to understand it remains unchanged. In an attempt to gain better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization, data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated part of the specific problem, but failing in a broader sense: There are still too many unsolved data visualization problems. As a solution, I seek to bring the individual fields together as part of a single process. I’ll be showing examples of work developed as part of my Ph.D. dissertation at the MIT Media Laboratory, as a postdoc studing genetics at the Eli & Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, and more recently running a company that consults on design and software development. The work ranges from illustrations of data for magazines and journals to software tools used by geneticists to interactive database applications for Fortune 10 companies. About the speaker Ben Fry runs a software and design consultancy in Cambridge, MA that focuses on understanding complex data. Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. With Casey Reas of UCLA, he develops Processing, an open source programming environment used by tens of thousands of students, artists, engineers and scientists. At the end of 2007, he published Visualizing Data with O'Reilly. Fry's personal work has shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Seed and Communications of the ACM. --------------- Refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm. Mark your calendar for these upcoming IIC Colloquia: Wednesday, Apr. 7: Bruce Boghosian, Tufts University Wednesday, Apr. 14: Frank Baetke, High Performance Computing, Hewlett Packard For more information about IIC colloquia and other events : http://iic.harvard.edu/events/upcoming _______________________________________________ iic-colloquium mailing list iic-colloquium(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.deas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-colloquium