Towards Computational Media: Metadata for Media Automation and Reuse

Marc Davis, School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley
   marc@sims.berkeley.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University November 1, 2002

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 also 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. His work is focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. Prof.
Davis' 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. 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 from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the MIT Media Laboratory, he developed Media Streams, an iconic visual language for annotating, retrieving, and repurposing digital video. From 1993 to 1999 at Interval Research Corporation, he led research and development teams in automatic media production technology for which a patent was awarded in 2001. From 1999 to 2002, Prof. Davis was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer at Amova, a developer of media automation and personalization technology. Prof. Davis is a co-founder of Narrative Intelligence Reading Group, which innovated interdisciplinary work at the intersection of literary theory, artificial intelligence, and media technology. Prof. Davis was also 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.

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