MIT launches Laboratory for Social Machines with major Twitter investment

Researchers from the Laboratory for Social Machines have partnered with The Washington Post to examine how people are discussing the current presidential election on Twitter. The researchers use a program that detects and categorizes tweets “to see which issues or candidates have had the biggest share of the conversation.”

BetaBoston reporter Curt Woodward writes about a new study by researchers from the MIT Laboratory for Social Machines examining how the government of Jun, a small town in southeastern Spain, is using Twitter to interact with residents. The researchers found that “residents’ tweets are incorporated into livestreamed city council meetings.”

Larry Greenemeier of Scientific American examines the new MIT Laboratory for Social Machines, based out of the Media Lab and funded by a commitment from Twitter. Greenemeier writes that the lab will be focused on finding new ways of “extracting meaningful semantic and social patterns from Twitter’s daily flood of selfies, rants and observations.”

Colleen Shalby reports for the PBS NewsHour that MIT is launching a new laboratory to examine how people use social media, in particular Twitter. Twitter is granting MIT researchers access to every tweet sent in the social network’s history as part of this new project. 

The MIT Media Lab has received a $10 million committment from Twitter to examine data from tweets, writes Jordan Graham for the Boston Herald. The lab will develop technologies to analyze “all the different kinds of media, mass media and social media that make up public opinion,” explains Professor Deb Roy.

Joshua Brustein writes for Bloomberg Businessweek that MIT is launching a new laboratory, funded by a $10 million committment from Twitter, to study social patterns on the web. “There are a lot of people at Twitter who are interesting in leveraging Twitter for social good,” says Professor Deb Roy.

“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Twitter are teaming up on a $10 million project to better understand social networks and figure out new ways to benefit from them,” reports the Associated Press. The partnership will allow MIT access to Twitter’s archive, as well as real-time monitoring of new tweets.

WBUR reporter Zeninjor Enwemeka writes about the new MIT laboratory launched this week to analyze social media.  “The new lab will focus on understanding how people behave across various types of media, and develop tools to make sense of social patterns,” writes Enwemeka. 

Andrea Chang of The Los Angeles Times writes about a new partnership between Twitter and MIT to study social media patterns. Twitter is providing the MIT Media Lab with $10 million to study and make sense of content across social and mass-media platforms.

“With a $10 million investment from Twitter, data scientists at MIT’s Media Lab are creating a new research group that will get access to Twitter’s entire feed of real-time and archived public tweets,” writes Yoree Koh for The Wall Street Journal. 

“Twitter Inc on Wednesday gave $10 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for research that would explore how people use and achieve shared goals using social networks,” writes Christina Farr for Reuters. The committment will fund a new laboratory where researchers will develop tools to analyze social media patterns. 

Steve Annear of Boston Magazine writes about Twitter’s $10 million committment to the MIT Media Lab to study the social network’s data. The research “will focus on developing new technologies so that researchers can better digest the logic and ‘social patterns’ in mass media, social media, data streams, and digital content,” writes Annear. 

Thanks to a $10 million committment from Twitter, researchers at MIT plan to establish a Laboratory for Social Machines to analyze Twitter messages in real time, writes Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe. “With this data, the lab plans to develop new communication tools to help address social problems,” Bray explains.