Backed by a $10 million, five-year funding commitment from Twitter, the MIT Media Lab has announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines to study public communication and social organization.
Twitter will also give the lab access to the full stream of real-time public tweets and the archive of every public tweet ever sent , via Gnip, the company’s in-house data provider.
The lab will focus on developing new technologies to understand “semantic and social patterns across the broad span of public mass media, social media, data streams, and digital content,” according to an MIT release. It will aim to create collaborative tools and mobile apps to enable new forms of public communication and social organization.
Deb Roy, Twitter’s chief media scientist and an associate professor at the Media Lab, will lead the LSM. The lab won’t limit its social media research to Twitter. Roy explained in the MIT release:
“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. 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.”
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