About

Andries van Dam is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he has been a faculty member since 1965. He was a co-founder of Brown's Computer Science Department and served as its first chairman from 1979 to 1985. Van Dam was also the director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization from 1996 to 1998, a consortium involving several leading universities. Additionally, he served as Brown's first Vice President for Research from 2002 to 2006. He earned his B.S. degree with Honors in Engineering Sciences from Swarthmore College in 1960, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963 and 1966, respectively. Van Dam has devoted his career to advancing how people and ideas connect through computers, focusing on interactive graphics, digital humanities education, and the societal impact of technology. He co-designed HES and FRESS, the first and second hypertext systems, which were foundational to modern markup and browsing technologies and influenced the development of the web. He co-authored the seminal textbook "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice," which remains a classic introduction to the field. Van Dam is credited with founding SICGRAPH and has received numerous prestigious awards, including the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, the SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award, the IEEE Centennial Medal, and multiple honorary doctorates. His research interests include computer graphics, hypermedia systems, post-WIMP user interfaces such as pen-centric computing, and educational software. For over four decades, he has worked on systems for creating and reading electronic books with interactive illustrations for teaching and research. Van Dam has also been active in professional service, co-founding ACM SIGGRAPH, chairing the Computing Research Association, and serving on editorial boards and advisory panels, including the Microsoft Research Technical Advisory Board. His career reflects a deep commitment to education, research innovation, and the integration of technology and society for the benefit of humanity.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Social Science
• World Wide Web
• Human–computer interaction
• Operating system
• Internet privacy
• Psychology
• Database
• Data science
• Engineering
• Cognitive psychology
• Multimedia
• Mechanical engineering

Selected publications

• A streamlit-powered cloud platform for machine learning-driven early detection of cardiovascular diseases

  Brain & Heart · 2025-11-25

  articleOpen access

  Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a major contributor to global morbidity and mortality, highlighting the need for early detection and prevention. This study introduces CardioPredict AI, a cloud-based system using advanced machine learning (ML) for CVD prediction. It offers scalable, accessible, and real-time diagnosis. The system leverages a comprehensive patient dataset that integrates multiple clinical features, including age, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure. Data preprocessing involved imputation, normalization, one-hot encoding, and the selection of 12 key features. The random forest model achieved an accuracy of 90.21%, a recall of 94.75%, and an F1-score of 91.31%, meeting the medical standards for heart disease prediction (recall >90%; false negatives <20). Cross-validation yielded a recall of 0.8940 ± 0.0889. Key features include personalized recommendations, real-time risk assessment through a Streamlit application, SHapley Additive exPlanation-based interpretability, and a dashboard for patient metrics. This study highlights the potential of ML and cloud computing to reduce the burden of CVDs through early detection.

  PublisherDOI

• 50 Years of Changes–How to Brace Yourself!

  2023

  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Having lived through the 50 years of changes, the panelists attempt to put them in calibrated perspective, not merely for the sake of fond reminiscence–and fun!–but as a guide to those who face the looming future changes.

  PublisherDOI

• Dash

  2020 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • World Wide Web

  Popular application suites, as well as specialized apps, are designed for workflows in which users focus on a single task for extended periods of time. These application silos slow down the many other workflows that require users to move with agility between tasks in a single working session. This is particularly true for creative people who have personalized patterns of gathering, organizing, and presenting information from a variety of sources. Moreover, each application comes with its own learning curve and data model, restricting users seeking to extend their workflows and in some cases, losing data through poor data transferring mechanisms such as clipboard copy and paste.

  PublisherDOI

• Reflections on a Half-Century of Hypertext

  2019-09-12 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  2019 marks not only the 30th anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall, but also the 50th anniversaries of equally momentous events of 1968-1969 in the US and elsewhere. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Hippie "flower power" and the closely related anti-Vietnam war movement were socio-political revolutions. In Europe, 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the "war to end all wars" and the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Counterpointing this societal turmoil, technology gave us hope. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Doug Engelbart and his team presented the "Mother of All Demos" of NLS at the '68 Fall Joint Computer Conference. Ivan Sutherland's pioneering Sketchpad (that demo'd interactive graphics in 1963) and Engelbart's NLS demo were two landmark events that were early examples of interactive computing in an era of batch computation. Interactive computing on time-sharing systems, combined with microminiaturization, would lead more than a decade later to the birth of the personal computer. It caused a revolution in the dominant model of computing that was centered on large mainframes and minicomputers used for science and engineering, finance and commerce. Interactive computing based on computer graphics and its use in hypermedia systems characterizes most of my research career. In 2019, it is difficult to remember the impact that interaction-based information structuring and sharing had on society; it certainly shaped my research career. In this presentation, I will reflect on the development of five decades of hypermedia systems and will demo three systems that have been highlights of my journey in hyperland. First, I'll show our FRESS hypertext system (still running 50-year old assembly code!), with the database of poetry used by a class of English students in 1976 in what is arguably the first online scholarly community. Next, I will demo our TAG (Touch Art Gallery) used by the Nobel Foundation a few years ago for a traveling exhibition on Alfred Nobel and all the Nobel Laureates. Finally, I'll interweave the hypertext-centric parts of my talk with some source material stored in an unbounded 2D workspace, using our current hypermedia system Dash, which is still under development and in an early but already useful state. These systems will be presented in the context of the research trends that led, ultimately, to the interconnected society in which we live. All of us working on our first hypertext systems in the '60s understood the potential of this technology. What I did not predict is that 50 years later the revolution in human-centered computing would remain far too unfinished in terms of its positive societal impact. Indeed, that impact and utility are increasingly in jeopardy from a variety of forces, both economic and political. I will close with some thoughts on both deliberately designed and unanticipated societal issues of social media that I feel we technologists must urgently help address.

  PublisherDOI

• Reflections on an introductory CS course, CS15, at Brown University

  ACM Inroads · 2018-11-01 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  research-article Reflections on an introductory CS course, CS15, at Brown University Share on Author: Andries van Dam Brown University Brown UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM InroadsVolume 9Issue 4December 2018 pp 58–62https://doi.org/10.1145/3284639Published:01 November 2018 2citation421DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations2Total Downloads421Last 12 Months68Last 6 weeks19 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

  PublisherDOI

• NuSys

  2017-08-31 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Knowledge workers consume and annotate digital documents such as PDF files, videos, images and text notes - in some cases collaboratively - to form mental models and gain insight. An abundance of software solutions and utilities that were designed to assist users in stages of this process but not in the process as a whole, which makes knowledge work with documents unnecessarily inefficient. In this paper, we introduce ideas on how to streamline common knowledge worker tasks, such as collaboratively searching, gathering and freely arranging fragments of various media documents to gain understanding and then transforming emergent insights into interactive structured visualizations. Furthermore, we present NuSys, an integrated development environment (IDE) specialized for document-centric workflows, that implements the core of these ideas.

  PublisherDOI

• Capturing 1D Channel Network Topology in NetCDF

  AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts · 2016-12-01

  article
  Publisher

• It stories: active checker

  Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · 2016-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Fix for Life. The Development of a New Embalming Method to Preserve Life‐like Morphology

  The FASEB Journal · 2015-04-01 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In medicine, the use of embalmed bodies is essential for studying anatomy and for training surgical skills. Almost all embalming fluids worldwide in use contain formalin and phenol of which formalin is responsible for fixation and phenol for preservation of the cadaver. As the anatomical community is more aware of the occupational risks involved and of the high costs to reduce levels of exposure to these toxic substances, the interest for low-hazardous alternatives grows. Furthermore, in surgical training there is a growing demand for embalmed cadavers with life-like morphology as a safer and more durable alternative for fresh (frozen) cadavers. The Fix for Life project aims to develop a low-hazardous embalming method preserving life-like morphology. To achieve this, surplus rats were used to test 12 experimental embalming recipes/methods. For comparison, 2 rats were embalmed by applying conventional methods. A fresh frozen rat served as a control. After 2-3 months the morphological properties (consistency, colour, flexibility and suitability for dissection and/or surgical techniques) of the rats were rated by an expert panel. Images of partially dissected rats (2-3 months post mortem) reviewed by the expert panel (max. score range 0-10). Advanced experiment showing excellent life-like morphology. Embalming experiments performed on surplus rats show that the newly developed Fix for Life method can provide in well preserved cadavers with life-like morphology for education and training uses without the risk of exposure to pathogens when using fresh cadavers or to toxic levels of formaldehyde and phenol when applying conventional embalming methods.

  PublisherDOI

• The Apollo Digital Image Archive

  Lunar and Planetary Science Conference · 2008-03-01 · 3 citations

  article
  Publisher

Recent grants

• ITR: Collaborative Research - (ASE) - (sim + int): Building Biologically Based Immune System Simulations for Education and Training

  NSF · $471k · 2004–2008

Frequent coauthors

• Steven Feiner

  Columbia University

  22 shared

• John F. Hughes

  Brown University

  20 shared

• Robert C. Zeleznik

  Brown University

  19 shared

• D. Brookshire Conner

  University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

  19 shared

• James D. Foley

  15 shared

• Robert F. Gurwitz

  Stellar Science (United States)

  13 shared

• Kenneth P. Herndon

  Providence College

  13 shared

• David E. Rice

  Hodges University

  12 shared

Education

• B.S., Electronic Engineering

  Swarthmore College

• M.S., Electronic Engineering

  University of Pennsylvania

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of Pennsylvania

  1966

Awards & honors

• Thomas J. Watson Jr. University Professor of Technology and…