Deb Roy is a Canadian scientist, tenured professor at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
(MIT), and the director of the
MIT Center for Constructive Communication.
Biography
Roy received a bachelor of applied science in computer engineering from the
University of Waterloo
The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...
, and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. He previously was the executive director of the MIT Media Lab and directed the Cognitive Machines group at the Media Lab, and the
Laboratory for Social Machines.
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 in machine learning, cognitive modeling, and human-machine interaction, his
TED Talk, ''Birth of a Word'' (based on the 2006–2009
Human Speechome Project
The Human Speechome Project (by analogy to "genome" and similar terms) is an effort to closely observe and model the language acquisition of a child over the first three years of life.
The project was conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of T ...
), has been viewed over 2.8 million times.
In 2008, he co-founded and was the founding CEO of
Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company, which ''
MIT Technology Review
''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...
'' named as one of the 50 most innovative companies of 2012. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013, and Roy served as chief media scientist of
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
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.
The Laboratory for Social Machines started in 2014 with an investment of $10 million from Twitter over a five-year period.
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."
In 2018, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral published "The spread of true and false news online" in ''Science''.
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
The conventional wisdom or received opinion is the body of ideas or explanations generally accepted by the public and/or by experts in a field.
History
The term "conventional wisdom" dates back to at least 1838, as a synonym for "commonplace kno ...
, 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."
See also
*
Human Speechome Project
The Human Speechome Project (by analogy to "genome" and similar terms) is an effort to closely observe and model the language acquisition of a child over the first three years of life.
The project was conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of T ...
References
External links
Deb Roy's MIT home page*
*
"The birth of a word" (TED2011)Bluefin Labs home page
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Roy, Deb
American computer scientists
Canadian computer scientists
Living people
MIT School of Architecture and Planning faculty
MIT Media Lab people
Scientists from Manitoba
Twitter, Inc. people
University of Waterloo alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)