Yahoo! Research Berkeley: Designing the Future of Social Media
The challenges of the internet cannot be solved by technology alone. New methods of research and product innovation are needed that enable the iterative design, development, and analysis of "sociotechnical" systems and applications. The possibility of creating large scale internet services that connect billions of humans, computational devices, and media assets into a functional network require us to rethink information science, social science, media studies, and design. This talk will discuss new ways of reconceptualizing the objects and methods of information technology research (especially in the area of multimedia information systems) as well innovation processes for corporate and academic research and development designed to address the challenges and opportunities of large scale internet media systems and applications. We will discuss these issues in the context of Yahoo! Research Berkeley-an innovative corporate-academic collaboration for research and development begun this past summer by Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley. Yahoo! Research Berkeley explores and invents social media and mobile media technology and applications at the intersection of media, technology, and people. Yahoo! Research Berkeley is focused on how we can gather and use media metadata to leverage context (especially from mobile devices) and the power of community (especially through tagging and sharing of media) to enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media content (especially photos, video, and audio) on the global internet.
Marc Davis is the Founding Director of Yahoo! Research Berkeley. He is responsible for the technical and creative vision and leadership for the Lab. 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. Prof. Davis is on leave from the University of California at Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research. Prof. Davis' work is focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. Prof. 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. From 1993 to 1998 at Interval Research Corporation, he led research and development teams in creating automatic media production technology. In 1997, he was an invited contributor to the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Communications of the ACM. From 1999 to 2002, he was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, Inc., a developer of media automation and personalization technology. Prof. Davis is also a Co-Founder and Executive Committee Member of the new interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Center for New Media (CNM). See http://research.yahoo.com/berkeley/.