Twitter Wants MIT To Make Sense Of Your Tweets
Though funded by Twitter, the LSM will have complete operational and academic independence.
In keeping with the academic mission of LSM, students and staff will work across many social media and mass media platforms — including, but not limited to, Twitter.
"The Laboratory for Social Machines will experiment in areas of public communication and social organization where humans and machines collaborate on problems that can't be solved manually or through automation alone," said Deb Roy, an associate professor at the Media Lab who will lead the LSM, and who also serves as Twitter's chief media scientist.
"Social feedback loops based on analysis of public media and data can be an effective catalyst for increasing accountability and transparency — creating mutual visibility among institutions and individuals," said Roy.
"With this investment, Twitter is seizing the opportunity to go deeper into research to understand the role Twitter and other platforms play in the way people communicate, the effect that rapid and fluid communication can have and apply those findings to complex societal issues," said Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter.
