November 21, 2005
From Mercury News:
Professor Marc Davis has dedicated years of his life to studying how the Internet is changing people from passive Web surfers to active content creators who post their own text, video and audio online.But like any professor, Davis longed for the ability to test his theories on a wider, real-world audience.
Now he has his chance.
Davis, a media professor at the University of California-Berkeley, has been given the keys to perhaps the biggest real-world lab in the world -- Yahoo's vast network of Web sites and the hundreds of millions of people who use them.
As head of Yahoo's new social media research lab in Berkeley, just a brisk walk from the UC-Berkeley campus, Davis has been tasked with helping Yahoo chart a course through the rapidly evolving world of ``social media'' -- from blogs and social networking services to interactive mobile devices...more...
His research projects include:
- 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.
- 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.
- Adaptive Media - adaptive media templates and automatic editing functions to mass customize and personalize media.
Here's his think piece (pdf)
Although we are living in the "computer age", the full implications of computational ideas have not been realized in our century. We are at the early apparatus phase of computational development—the profound ideas of computation have not yet affected all other fields of human inquiry, especially our thinking about media.
As computational ideas transform our thinking about media, new apparatuses and new ideas will emerge that will change relationships to media and to each other.
The ways we create, communicate, and play will become computationally revisioned, transforming us in the process.
We are on the verge of a monumental change—like the invention of writing—that will arise out of the still evolving transformations of the television, camcorders, and computers.
What the next 50 years of computational motion pictures will bring is a fundamental change in the possibilities of “written” language and communication, and I am not talking about email.
