Dr. Davis has been a seminal contributor to the fields of knowledge-based systems and human-computer interaction, publishing some more than 100 articles and playing a central role in the development of several systems. He and his research group are developing advanced tools that permit natural multi-modal interaction with computers by creating software that understands users as they sketch, gesture, and talk.
He is the co-author of Knowledge-Based Systems in AI. In 1990 he was named a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI and in 1995 was elected to a two-year term as its President. From 1995-1998 he served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the U. S. Air Force, earning the USAF Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service.
Dr. Davis has also been active in the area of intellectual property and software. In 1990 he served as expert to the Court in Computer Associates v. Altai, a case that produced the abstraction, filtration, comparison test now widely used in software copyright cases.
From 1998 to 2000 he served as the chairman of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences study on intellectual property rights and the information infrastructure entitled The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age, published by the National Academy Press in February, 2000.
Dr. Davis has been a Full Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT since 1989. He has served as Associate Director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1993-1998), as a Research Director of CSAIL from 2003-2007, and as Associate Director of CSAIL from 2012-2014.