
Chief Scientist and VP of ESP, Yahoo! Connected Life
San Francisco Bay Area

Chief Scientist and VP of ESP, Yahoo! Connected Life
San Francisco Bay Area
Marc Davis is Chief Scientist and VP of ESP of Yahoo! Connected Life. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His 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, and to connect to each other in new ways. As Chief Scientist for Connected Life and VP 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 products from Yahoo! Connected Life such as oneConnect, which reinvents mobile communications by aggregating a user's social networks and communications tools into a socially connected address book.
From 2002 to 2006, Marc Davis served as Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research and co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for New Media. In 2005, Marc Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to create Yahoo! Research Berkeley where he served as Founding Director. At Yahoo! Research Berkeley, Marc Davis and his teams produced breakthrough public prototypes in mobile social media: ZoneTag, context-aware mobile photo capture and tagging software; TagMaps, a collective map of human attention created by analyzing the millions of geocoded Flickr photos; and Zurfer, a context-aware mobile photo browser. In 2006, Marc Davis joined Yahoo! to bring his vision of social media and mobile media to billions of people around the world. 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.
social media; mobile media; media metadata; computational media production, sharing, and reuse; media remix; mobile media technology and applications; mobile monetization; social monetization; context-aware systems and applications, knowledge representation; human-computer interaction; narrative intelligence; sociotechnical design processes; New Media; social media marketing; social media monetization; innovation.
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
April 2008 — Present (7 months)
As Chief Scientist of Yahoo! Connected Life, Marc Davis is focussed on inventing and realizing the key technologies, platforms, and applications that will shape the future of mobile for billions of people around the world. His 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, and to connect to each other in new ways.
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
March 2007 — Present (1 year 8 months)
As VP of ESP (Early Stage Products) in Yahoo! Connected Life, Marc and his team invent and help realize the future of mobile, social, media, monetization, and platforms. ESP focuses on strategy, intellectual property, and early stage prototypes. ESP has been involved in innovative products from Yahoo! Connected Life such as oneConnect, which reinvents mobile communications by aggregating a user's social networks and communications tools into a socially connected address book. ESP was also a key contributor to the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and the vision demo for the future of Yahoo! shown at CES 2008.
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
July 2006 — Present (2 years 4 months)
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. 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.
(Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Higher Education industry)
July 2002 — June 2006 (4 years)
(Public Company; 11-50 employees; YHOO; Research industry)
July 2005 — June 2006 (1 year)
Yahoo! Research Berkeley is a new research partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and the University of California at Berkeley 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. Yahoo! Research Berkeley combines world-class media technology and design research with the scale and impact of the world's leading internet media company. We are bringing together world-renowned experts in the fields of media technology, social software, context-aware computing, mobile computing, and user and design research who will shape the future of internet media. In support of these goals, Yahoo! Research Berkeley and the University of California at Berkeley have created an innovative corporate-academic collaboration for research and development.
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Online Media industry)
December 1998 — June 2002 (3 years 7 months)
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)
June 1993 — December 1998 (5 years 7 months)
(Educational Institution; 201-500 employees; Higher Education industry)
September 1990 — January 1995 (4 years 5 months)
PhD, Media Arts and Sciences, 1990 — 1995
MA, Philosophy and Literary Theory, 1984 — 1987
BA, College of Letters, 1980 — 1984