Yves Bergquist is an AI researcher and Director of the “AI in Media” Project at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), a research hub within USC’s School of Cinematic Arts that unites all five major Hollywood studios alongside technology leaders including Microsoft, Verizon, Cisco, and Amazon Studios. At the Center, Yves and his team apply frontier AI methods to help media companies develop deep insights into their content, their audiences, and the cognitive relationship between the two — working to solve the longstanding problem of wasted spend in content development and marketing, estimated at $81 billion annually in North America alone.

A recognized voice on responsible AI in media, Yves has spent several years collaborating with SMPTE to build an industry-wide framework for ethical AI standards, and has led industry-funded research into the moral bounding of conversational agents. He also serves on the Generative AI Task Force at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he contributes to the lab’s work on emerging storytelling platforms and methods.

Yves is additionally the co-founder, CEO, and Chief AI Scientist of Corto, an AI startup developing tools to make stories and audiences computable through the deep semantic analysis of narratives. Currently in private beta with a dozen studios, advertising agencies, and global consumer brands, Corto is already actively used to develop film, television, and branded content at scale. He is based in Los Angeles.