Frank van Ham

Designer of interactive information visualizations and one of the main researchers behind IBM's Many Eyes project, van Ham has more than a decade of experience in designing and deploying interactive information visualizations. Some of his past projects included Many Eyes, a web-based visualization tool that allowed the user to upload data sets and generate various types of visualizations from that data; and SequoiaView, a visual disk browser that used a visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide the user with a single picture of the entire contents of their hard drive.

After obtaining his Ph.D. in Information Visualization in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, he joined IBM Research in Cambridge, USA as a post-doctorate and later as a full-time researcher. Van Ham has worked with the IBM Business Analytics division on integrating visualization into IBM's product portfolio. Data visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data.

He subsequently joined ILOG, a recent IBM acquisition, in Paris, France, where he has worked on improving and inventing IBM products.