Marc Davis

Partner Architect, Microsoft

Marc Davis invents mobile, social, media, and personal data technologies that connect people, the web, and the world. With a twenty year career of technology research and development spanning the MIT Media Lab, Interval Research, UC Berkeley, Yahoo!, Invention Arts, and Microsoft, he has done pioneering work in knowledge representation, metadata, multimedia systems, context-aware computing, computer vision, mobile platforms and applications, social media and sociotechnical systems, mobile and social advertising, and personal data technologies and applications. He has transformed his ideas into over 150 patent applications, as well as numerous research prototypes, products, and publications. Marc Davis is a Partner Architect at Microsoft working on the vision and technology strategy for Microsoft’s Online Services Division. Before Microsoft, Marc Davis was Chief Scientist at Invention Arts, where he focused on new approaches to how people can better control, share, and benefit from their personal data. His ideas on Personal Data Banking and Exchange inform a joint project with the World Economic Forum and other organizations to redesign the personal data ecosystem. Before Invention Arts, Marc Davis was Chief Scientist and Vice President of Early Stage Products (ESP) for Yahoo! Mobile, where he and his team invented and helped realize the future of mobile, social, media, monetization, and platforms. While developing a large portfolio of strategic patents and internal prototypes, ESP worked with product teams on innovative products from Yahoo! Mobile such as oneConnect and Social Pulse that reinvented mobile communications by aggregating a user’s social networks and communications tools into a socially connected address book. Marc Davis was also a key contributor to the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) for making Yahoo!’s platforms and products more open and social, as well as the vision demo for the future of Yahoo! shown at CES 2008. In 2005, Marc Davis worked with Yahoo! and UC Berkeley to launch Yahoo! Research Berkeley, which produced a number of breakthrough public prototypes in mobile media and social media: ZoneTag, context-aware mobile photo capture and tagging software; TagMaps, a collective map of human attention created by analyzing the millions of geocoded Flickr photos; Zurfer, a context-aware mobile photo browser; and Remixer, a web-based video remixing tool developed for the San Francisco International Film Festival. From 2002 to 2006, Marc Davis served as Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research whose projects included: Mobile Media Metadata (context-aware mobile media technology and applications that leverage contextual metadata—spatial, temporal and social—to infer media content and support media tagging, sharing, and reuse, including pioneering work in context-aware mobile face and place recognition); the Social Uses of Personal Media (social science and design research to learn how and why people use digital imaging in order to support the design of next generation mobile media applications); Media Streams Metadata Exchange (media metadata framework for annotating, retrieving, sharing, and remixing video on the Web); Active Capture (interactive cameras that use signal processing and computer-human interaction to capture high quality, reusable, annotated media assets); and Adaptive Media (adaptive media templates and automatic editing functions to mass customize and personalize media). Garage Cinema Research worked on its projects with many sponsors including British Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, France Telecom, Nokia, Ricoh Innovations, AT&T, Opera Software, TEKES, and the UC Discovery Grant for Digital Media. At UC Berkeley, Marc Davis was also a Co-Founder and Executive Committee Member of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Center for New Media, an Advisory Board Member of the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Berkeley Institute of Design. From 1999 to 2002, Marc Davis was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, Inc., a developer of media automation and personalization technology that developed patented personalized video advertising systems and formats. From 1993 to 1998, Marc Davis was a researcher and project coordinator at Interval Research, where he led research and development teams in creating patented automatic digital video production technology that automated direction, cinematography, editing, and remixing. In recognition of his thought leadership in multimedia computing, in 1997, Marc was an invited contributor to the “The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans” edition of the Communications of the ACM, for which he wrote a vision piece about the next 50 years of media technology. From 1990 to 1995, Marc Davis did his doctoral work at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he developed Media Streams, an iconic visual language system for annotating, retrieving, and remixing digital video. At the MIT Media Laboratory, he also co-founded the Narrative Intelligence Reading Group, which innovated interdisciplinary discourse at the intersection of literary and media theory, artificial intelligence, and media technology and design. In 2003, “Narrative Intelligence” was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences as one of its “promising areas for transdisciplinary work.” Marc Davis gives talks at leading industrial and academic conferences around the world such as Web 2.0, CES, CTIA, Telco 2.0, Mobilize, Mobile 2.0, Mobile Monday, Mobile Nation, ETel, EconSM, MIT Futures of Entertainment, 0x0x0x, CTM Global Mobility Roundtable, CTM Executive Round Table, IFTF Technology Horizons, ACM Multimedia, ICME Multimedia, ACM WWW, ACM Ubicomp, ACM CHI, ACM MindTrek, MIT Media Lab Colloquium, and the Stanford People, Computers, and Design Seminar. Marc Davis’ ideas and work have been featured in major publications such as New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, BBC News, New Scientist, Business Week, San Francisco Chronicle, ZDNet, CNet, TechCrunch, GigaOm, AllThingsD, SearchEngineLand, ReadWriteWeb, internet2Go, GoMoNews, and TheStreet.com. Several influential books have featured articles by or about Marc Davis’ work including: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More; Mobile Nation: Creating Methodologies for Mobile Platforms; Narrative Intelligence; Beyond Productivity: Information, Technology, Innovation, and Creativity; Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory; and Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000. Marc Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany on a German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory. Additional information, including status updates, blog posts, upcoming speaking events, publications, and videos by and about Marc Davis are available at http://marcdavis.me, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.