UCLA Information Studies Seminar

Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology

Marc Davis
UC Berkeley

Thursday, April 24th, 2003, 3pm-5pm
GSE&IS Building, Room 111
(just west of the Research Library)

Abstract: Over the past five hundred years, we have seen the development of technologies and social practices that enable the educated populace to read and write text. However, with video (including motion pictures and television), millions of people "read" it everyday, but very few are able to effectively "write" it. The changing of this asymmetry will require research and innovation that more intimately integrate video and computation. This presentation will address the theoretical issues, core technologies, and applications that will enable video to become a computational data type that people can easily create, access, share, and reuse. Specifically, the research challenge is to develop technologies that create metadata about the semantic content and syntactic structure of video, and that use that metadata to automate the production and reuse of video. Addressing this challenge requires a methodology that interleaves the construction and analysis of artifacts and theories, and that combines ideas and technologies from multiple disciplines: information science, computer science, film theory and production, media studies, and human-centered user interaction design.

Marc Davis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley where he directs the Garage Cinema Research group. His research and teaching encompass the theory, design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using media metadata to automate media production and reuse. From 1999 to 2002, he was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, a developer of media automation and personalization technology. He earned his BA in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his MA in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his PhD in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.

Everyone is invited.