
Garage Cinema Research Group:
Prof. Davis' work is focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. 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. Prof. Davis and his students in Garage Cinema Research are working on: Media Streams (a semantic ontology and visual language for creating metadata throughout the media production cycle to enable media reuse); Active Capture (automates direction and cinematography using real-time audio-video analysis in an interactive control loop to create reusable media assets at the point of capture); Adaptive Media (uses adaptive media templates and automatic editing functions to mass customize and personalize media); Mobile Media Metadata (leverages the spatio-temporal context and social community of media capture to automate metadata creation for mobile media capture, sharing, and reuse); and the Social Uses of Personal Media (analyzes the social uses of personal media to predict future uses and shape the design of next-generation personal media devices and applications). Working together, these research projects and their related technologies will radically simplify, decentralize, and personalize media production, sharing, and reuse, bringing about a "Garage Cinema" revolution in which people use computational media to communicate with each other every day.