Marc Davis

Marc Davis is Social Media Guru at Yahoo! Inc. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of digital media systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people around the world to produce, share, and remix media.

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, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory. From 1993 to 1998 at Interval Research Corporation, he led research and development teams in creating patented automatic media production technology. In 1997, he was an invited contributor to the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Communications of the ACM, for which he wrote a vision piece about the next 50 years of media technology. From 1999 to 2002, Marc Davis was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, Inc., a developer of media automation and personalization technology. From 2002 to 2005 at the UC Berkeley School of Information, Prof. Davis directed Garage Cinema Research whose projects included: Mobile Media Metadata; the Social Uses of Personal Media; Media Streams Metadata Exchange; Active Capture; and Adaptive Media. At UC Berkeley, Prof. Davis was also a Co-Founder of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Center for New Media (CNM). In 2005, Prof. Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to launch Yahoo! Research Berkeley, a research partnership to explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the web. In 2006, Marc Davis joined Yahoo! Inc. as “Social Media Guru” to formulate strategy and take action to invent and realize the future of social media and mobile media.

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