Marc Davis / [Yahoo360)(http://360.yahoo.com/profile-N_9w6bg8erQdA0jtGFsziM3Y)
Marc Davis was most recently the Chief Scientist of Yahoo! Connected Life and Director of ESP, until he stepped down in July 2009. His work focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. Davis’ research encompasses the theory, design, and development of sociotechnical systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people around the world to produce, describe, share, and remix media.
As Chief Scientist for Connected Life and Director of ESP (Early Stage Products), Marc and his team invent and help realize the future of mobile, social, media, monetization, and platforms. ESP has been involved in innovative upcoming products from Yahoo Connected Life such as oneConnect, which reinvents mobile communications, and onePlace, which reinvents mobile content. Marc was also a key driver behind the Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) and Jerry Yang’s vision demo for the future of Yahoo at CES 2008.
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. As part of his doctoral dissertation at the MIT Media Laboratory, he developed Media Streams, an iconic visual language for annotating, retrieving, and remixing 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, Davis 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.
He has also worked as an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
