Benjamin Fry is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 expert in data visualization

Data visualization

Data visualization is the study of the visual representation of data, meaning "information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information"....

, principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy in Boston, MA, a co-creator of Processing

Processing (programming language)

Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks...

, an open source

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 and integrated development environment

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the basics of computer programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

 in a visual context.Ben Fry, author's profile at the O'Reilly

O'Reilly

O'Reilly is the Anglicised form of the Gaelic Ó Raghallaigh. It is also the patronymic form of the Irish name Reilly . It is commonly found throughout Ireland, with the greatest concentration of the surname found in County Cavan followed by Longford, Meath, Westmeath, Fermanagh and Monaghan, and...

 website

He received his Ph.D. ("Computational Information Design") from the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

. During 2006-2007, Ben Fry was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design

Carnegie Mellon School of Design

The Carnegie Mellon School of Design in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States is a degree granting institution and a division of Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts. The School of Design offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in either industrial design or communication design...

.

His other interests include visualization of genetic data. His personal work in this area was featured at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum National Design Triennial in 2003.

His other personal art works were featured in the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, Whitney Biennial in 2002, Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 in New York (2001, 2008), at Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica is an organization based in Linz, Austria, founded in 1979 around a festival for art, technology and society that was part of the International Bruckner Festival. Herbert W. Franke is one of its founders. It became its own festival and a yearly event in 1986. Its director until 1995...

 in Linz, Austria (2000, 2002, 2005) and in the films Minority Report

Minority Report

"The Minority Report" is a 1956 science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe. The story is about a future society where murders are prevented through the efforts of three mutants who can see the future...

and The Hulk

The Processing design environment developed together with Casey Reas won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica

Prix Ars Electronica

The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music...

 in 2005.

Ben Fry is the winner of the 2011 National Design Award in category "Interaction Design"

Books

• 2007: (with Casey Reas) Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, MIT Press
  MIT Press
  The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...
  
  
• 2007: Visualizing Data, O'Reilly
• 2010: (with Casey Reas) Getting Started with Processing, O'Reilly