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. As Social Media Guru, Marc Davis connects various groups at Yahoo! to formulate strategy and to take action to invent and realize the future of social media and mobile 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. 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.

From 2002 to 2005 at the UC Berkeley School of Information, Marc Davis 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 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). Garage Cinema Research worked on its projects with many sponsors including British Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, France Telecom, Nokia, Ricoh Innovations, 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 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).

In 2005, Marc Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to launch Yahoo! Research Berkeley, a new 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. Marc Davis was the Founding Director of Yahoo! Research Berkeley and many Garage Cinema Research students and alums are involved in this new lab. Several projects from Yahoo! Research Berkeley build on his teams’ prior work in Garage Cinema Research such as: ZoneTag, a context-aware mobile photo capture and tagging software; and the International Remixer, a web-based video remixing tool developed with the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 2006, Marc Davis was asked by Yahoo! to bring his vision of social media to the larger company and serve as “Social Media Guru” for Yahoo! Inc.