Biography

Deb Roy is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is Chief Media Scientist of Twitter. He conducts research at the MIT Media Lab on language, games, and social dynamics at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. In 2008 he co-founded and was the founding CEO of Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company, which MIT Technology Review named as one of the 50 most innovative companies of 2012. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013. An author of over 100 academic papers in machine learning, cognitive modeling, and human-machine interaction, his TED talk, Birth of a Word, has been viewed over 2.5 million times. A native of Canada, Roy received a bachelor of applied science (computer engineering) from the University of Waterloo and a PhD in media arts and sciences from MIT. He is @dkroy on Twitter.