MIT Prof. Deb Roy Named to Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder

MIT professor Deb Roy has been named to the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder, which aims to identify and prioritize the most critical sources and causes of information disorder and deliver a set of short-term actions and longer-term goals to help government, the private sector, and civil society respond to this modern-day crisis of faith in key institutions.

Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, Roy directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication and is executive director of the MIT Media Lab. He leads research in applied machine learning and human-machine interaction with applications in designing systems for learning and constructive dialogue, and for mapping and analyzing large scale media ecosystems.

Roy is also co-founder and Chair of Cortico, a nonprofit social venture that is developing and operating the Local Voices Network to foster constructive public conversations across political and cultural divides. Roy was co-founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs, a media analytics company that analyzed the interactions between television and social media at scale. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013, Twitter’s largest acquisition of the time. From 2013-2017 Roy served as Twitter’s Chief Media Scientist. 

An author of over 160 academic papers, his popular TED talk “Birth of a Word” presents his research on his son’s language development that led to new ideas in media analytics.  A native of Canada, Roy received his Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

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Also appointed to the commission is Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. Journalist Katie Couric, Color of Change president Rashad Robinson and Chris Krebs, the former director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, are the co-chairs.