Deb Roy | |
|---|---|
 Deb Roy at an MIT faculty meeting, 2014 | |
| Born | |
| Alma mater | MIT University of Waterloo |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | MIT, Bluefin Labs, Twitter |
| Notable students | Bridgit Mendler |
Deb Roy is a Canadian scientist, tenured professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. [1] [2]
Roy received a bachelor of applied science in computer engineering from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. [3] He previously was the executive director of the MIT Media Lab and directed the Cognitive Machines group at the Media Lab, [4] and the Laboratory for Social Machines. [5]
Roy conducts research on language, games, and social dynamics at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. An author of over 150 academic papers [6] [7] in machine learning, cognitive modeling, and human-machine interaction, his TED Talk, Birth of a Word (based on the 2006–2009 Human Speechome Project), has been viewed over 2.8 million times. [8]
In 2008, he co-founded and was the founding CEO of Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company, which MIT Technology Review named as one of the 50 most innovative companies of 2012. [9] Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013, [10] and Roy served as chief media scientist of Twitter from 2013 to 2017. He is also co-founder and chairman of Cortico, a nonprofit media technology company whose Local Voices Network aims to foster constructive public conversations across political and cultural divides. [11]
The Laboratory for Social Machines started in 2014 with an investment of $10 million from Twitter over a five-year period. [12] The agreement also gives the lab access to all historical Twitter data and access to the firehose of all real-time tweets. The lab aims to "create new platforms for both individuals and institutions to identify, discuss, and act on pressing societal problems." [12]
In 2018, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral published "The spread of true and false news online" in Science. [13] The paper examined "~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times," and found that "Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information." Additionally, the authors found that "Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it."
Nicholas Negroponte is a Greek American architect. He is the founder and chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also founded the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). Negroponte is the author of the 1995 bestseller Being Digital translated into more than forty languages.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the President of Chiba Institute of Technology. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. Ito is general partner of Neoteny Labs, and former board member of Creative Commons, The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and Sony Corporation. Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.
Judith Stefania Donath is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She has written papers on various aspects of the Internet and its social impact, such as Internet society and community, interfaces, virtual identity issues, and other forms of collaboration that have become manifest with the advent of connected computing.
Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.
Edwin Joseph Selker, better known as Ted Selker, is an American computer scientist known for his user interface inventions.
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. It differs from disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive and propagated information. Early definitions of misinformation focused on statements that were patently false, incorrect, or not factual. Therefore, a narrow definition of misinformation refers to the information's quality, whether inaccurate, incomplete, or false. However, recent studies define misinformation per deception rather than informational accuracy because misinformation can include falsehoods, selective truths, and half-truths.
Rumor control centers (RCC) and rumor control mechanisms, identify, investigate and mitigate potentially disruptive rumors, capable of driving a cycle of harmful escalation. Rumor control centers, which often operate call centers, respond to crisis situations such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or civil disturbances.
Frank Moss is a researcher, technology and biotechnology entrepreneur, academician and author. Moss was the director of the MIT Media Lab from 2006 to 2011. He remains a professor of the practice and the principal investigator for the New Media Medicine research group, which he founded.
Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.
Alex Paul "Sandy" Pentland is an American computer scientist, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and serial entrepreneur.
The Human Speechome Project is an effort to closely observe and model the language acquisition of a child over the first three years of life.
Reblogging is the mechanism in blogging which allows users to repost the content of another user's post with an indication that the source of the post is another user.
Joshua Brett Tenenbaum is Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to mathematical psychology and Bayesian cognitive science. According to the MacArthur Foundation, which named him a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, "Tenenbaum is one of the first to develop and apply probabilistic and statistical modeling to the study of human learning, reasoning, and perception, and to show how these models can explain a fundamental challenge of cognition: how our minds understand so much from so little, so quickly."
Ramesh Srinivasan is a professor of Information Studies.
Bluefin Labs was a Cambridge, MA-based social TV analytics company that used publicly available social media commentary from Twitter, Facebook and blogs to measure viewer engagement with television shows and ads at scale – historically a costly and complex problem for TV and marketing industries to solve.
Hoax Slayer was a fact-checking website established in 2003 by Brett Christensen, dedicated to critically analyzing the veracity of urban legends. While it was best known for debunking false stories and internet scams, it also hosted a page listing strange but true stories.
Laura E. Schulz is a professor of cognitive science at the brain and cognitive sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the principal investigator of the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT. Schulz is known for her work on the early childhood development of cognition, causal inference, discovery, and learning.
The social influence bias is an asymmetric herding effect on online social media platforms which makes users overcompensate for negative ratings but amplify positive ones. Positive social influence can accumulate and result in a rating bubble, while negative social influence is neutralized by crowd correction. This phenomenon was first described in a paper written by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral and Sean J. Taylor in 2014, then the question was revisited by Cicognani et al., whose experiment reinforced Munchnik's and his co-authors' results.
Arnav Kapur is a computer scientist and engineer at MIT. He is known for his work and advocacy in developing AI systems that enhance and complement human abilities.
