Marc Davis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley where he directs Garage Cinema Research. Prof. Davis is also the Founding Director of Yahoo! Research Berkeley. His work is focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. Prof. Davis' research and teaching encompass the theory, design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using media metadata to automate media production, sharing, and reuse. Garage Cinema Research is researching and developing: 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 sharing and reuse); 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 media 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).

Prof. 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. As part of his doctoral dissertation at the MIT Media Laboratory, he developed Media Streams, an iconic visual language for annotating, retrieving, and repurposing digital video. At the MIT Media Laboratory, Marc Davis 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. From 1993 to 1998 at Interval Research Corporation, he led research and development teams in creating automatic media production technology for which a patent was awarded in 2001. 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. At UC Berkeley, Prof. Davis is a Co-Founder and Executive Committee Member of the new interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Center for New Media (CNM), an Advisory Board Member of the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium (ATC), and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD).