Ernest Davis received his BS in mathematics from MIT in 1977 and his PhD in computer science from Yale in 1984. He has been on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the Courant Institute, New York University since 1983.

Davis’ research area is the representation of commonsense knowledge in AI systems. His work has focused primarily on spatial and physical reasoning, but he has also done work in reasoning about knowledge, belief, plans, and goals, and their interaction with physical reasoning. He is currently working in collaboration with Gary Marcus of the NYU Psychology Department on combining AI and psychological models of commonsense physical reasoning.

Davis is the author of more than 50 scientific papers and three books: Representing and Acquiring Geographic Knowledge (1986); Representations of Commonsense Knowledge (1990); and Linear Algebra and Probability for Computer Science Applications (2012). He has created four regular courses in the Computer Science Department curriculum, including one of the first courses on web search engines offered anywhere. He has supervised nine doctoral theses and five master’s theses. He has served as a program committee member for 50 scientific conferences and workshops and as a referee for 15 journals. In addition, he served as book reviews editor for IEEE Expert and is currently an area editor for ACM Transactions on Computational Logic.

Davis writes book and article reviews on topics ranging across computer science, mathematics, cognitive psychology, history of science, scientific biography, digital humanities, invented languages, and children’s literature. In addition to Computing Reviews, these have been published in SIAM News, Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Expert, American Scientist, Mythprint, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker.