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james davis
davis@cs.ucsc.edu

 

James Davis

davis@cs.ucsc.edu Email
363 Engineering II Office
   
1156 High St #SOE3
Computer Science Dept
UC Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Address
     
School of Engineering
UC Santa Cruz

Affiliations




 
Teaching
2019 Spring
CMPS160/L - Introduction to Computer Graphics

2018 Fall CMPS160/L - Introduction to Computer Graphics    
2018 Fall CMPS260 - Computer Graphics    

 
Research

Computer Graphics, Machine Vision, Computational Photography
I'm primarily interested in how we acquire models of the visual complexity of the real world. I've worked on interpreting images from standard cameras, and also building new kinds of cameras, 3D sensors, and other crazy devices to make these measurements. Of course displaying this visual complexity is as important as measuring it. Current projects relate to image based sensors for relightable images, as well as novel displays for both relightable images and 3D stereo.

Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD)
Computing technology has historically had huge impacts on the cost structure of many industries, dramatically lowering the costs of some activities, which in turn affects what is possible. It has the potential to have similar huge impacts on global poverty, by similarly lowering costs in key places.  Current projects are related to delivering digital work to needy populations, telemedicine eye care, and measuring water collection time and distances in urban informal settlements.

Human Computation
Silicon computers can't do everything. For example, they are terrible at most tasks in computer vision. However people have great visual reasoning skills. If we could just make a function call to a person, we could build many computer systems and services that are currently impossible. The field of human computation is broadly about how we can actually build these sorts of joint systems. For me, this ties together the two areas above. I have current research both reinventing computer vision to make use of human computation, as well as looking at the skills and employability of the human workers who are now part of the system.

Entrepreneurship
While I don't publish on entrepreneurship in the academic sense that a economics professor does, I am deeply interested in how we bring our academic research to actual use in the real world. I'm on the advisory boards of a number of startups which range from brand new student dreams to companies with 8-digit valuations. I was the founding Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at UCSC, and it has now trasitioned to other leadership.