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Articles by Deb Roy
Q&A: Building accountability behind our words — and AI’s — in civic conversations
By Peter Dizikes When government officials craft policies, there is often a comment period for public feedback. Lawmakers have long had to sort through fake feedback that is mass-produced in an effort to sway policy, but they’ve generally gotten used to detecting it. With, artificial intelligence, however, people can submit realistic-seeming comments, which are harder to dismiss as being fabrications with no person behind them.
Who stands behind the words?
In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission received more than 22 million public comments on its proposal to repeal net neutrality rules. An investigation by the New York attorney general later found that nearly 18 million of these comments were fake—many submitted under the names of real people who never wrote them (Office of the New York State Attorney General 2021).
What's Taking Form? Om Gokhale and Gadfly
Developed by researchers in the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (MIT CCC), Gadfly is an AI tool that acts as a critical instigator, asking questions that invite critical reflections, rather than offering easy answers or telling users what they want to hear. “It's not telling you what to do,” says MIT CCC graduate student Om Gokhale.
Words Without Consequence
For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively—deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises—while bearing no vulnerability for what they say. Millions of people already rely on chatbots powered by large language models, and have integrated these synthetic interlocutors into their personal and professional lives.
Immutability in Cloud Data Storage is Broken - and It’s Costing You a Fortune
Or how I learned to stop worrying and start locking my blobs properly. There comes a time in every IT professional’s life when they utter a solemn oath, raise one hand to the sky (the other grasping a slightly stale coffee), and vow to “keep data safe forever.” Thus was born the noble quest for immutability — that mystical, unyielding state where data is impervious to the ravages of ransomware, rogue employees, and regulatory wrath.
AI, Algorithms, and Anomalies: Machine Learning’s Jolly Romp Through Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity and Cloud Security aren’t what they used to be — it’s no longer just firewalls and grumpy sysadmins yelling at SSH logs. With the rise of sophisticated cyber threats, Machine Learning has entered the fray like a top-hatted detective solving mysteries before tea. From classifying phishing emails to predicting the next zero-day exploit, ML models are the unsung Jeeves to our besieged Bertie Wooster of security operations.
FRONTLINE Launches Youth Civic Voices Initiative – MIT Media Lab
A new collaboration with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication empowers young people to shape the future of journalism and civic dialogue through AI and storytelling. FRONTLINE, the acclaimed PBS documentary series produced at GBH in Boston, has announced the launch of a two-phase Youth Civic Voices Initiative designed to engage young people in civic dialogue through journalistic storytelling, emerging technologies, and public conversation.
Sensemaking.
We met Deb Roy through a mutual friend. He has an impressive resume, to say the least. This from MIT: Mr. Roy is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. He leads research in applied machine learning and human-machine system design with applications in understanding large scale social media ecosystems and designing communication tools and social networks.
How to Tackle Truth Decay
When then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the California wildfires in 2020, the scientific opinion he heard was that climate change was real and had contributed to the conflagrations that ended up more than 4 million acres and killing 31 people. His response? “ Science doesn’t know .” Millions of Americans trusted Trump, a fact he leveraged to attack the trustworthiness of science itself. Trump’s actions are part of a larger pattern of assault on expertise.
Desinformación por razón de sexo y redes sociales: Gendered disinformation and social networks
The subject of this article is gender-based disinformation on social networks. This type of disinformation is identified with those contents that circulate on networks with the aim of attacking women for being women and expelling them from public debate. This type of behavior undermines women’s credibility in the public eye and can lead to their abandonment of the public sphere.
The Digital Town Square Doesn’t Exist Yet
Many people have put forth theories about why, exactly, the internet is bad. The arguments go something like this: Social platforms encourage cruelty, snap reactions, the spreading of disinformation, and they allow for all of this to take place without accountability, instantaneously and at scale. Clearly, we must upgrade our communication technology and habits to meet the demands of pluralistic democracies in a networked age.
[2308.15556] Polarized Speech on Online Platforms
[Submitted on 29 Aug 2023 ( v1 ), last revised 7 Sep 2023 (this version, v2)] Title:Polarized Speech on Online Platforms Download a PDF of the paper titled Polarized Speech on Online Platforms, by Suyash Fulay and Deb Roy Download PDF Abstract: While political polarization has increased as measured through surveys, currently we lack comprehensive, longitudinal, and ecologically valid measurement of the polarization of online political speech that spans social media platforms.
MIT's Center for Constructive Communication takes aim at the destructive nature of social media
The MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) and the closely affiliated nonprofit Cortico today announced the launch of a broad-based effort that draws on expertise in face-to-face human dialogue, digital networks, and machine learning to develop safe and trusted spaces for meaningful, nonpolarizing human connection and civic impact.
Revolutionizing the Utilities Industry with Generative AI: Exploring the Potential and Opportunities
image credit: Photo by Sanket Mishra from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/webpage-of-chatgpt-a-prototype-ai-chatbot-is-seen-on-the-website-of-openai-on-a-smartphone-examples-capabilities-and-limitations-are-shown-16629368/ Senior Manager , Accenture A strategic and accomplished executive, offering 15+ years of a performance record, in-depth and diversified technology leadership experience, and consistent achievement in catalyzing IT...
All a-board: sharing educational data science research with school districts
[Submitted on 18 Apr 2023 ( v1 ), last revised 5 Jul 2023 (this version, v2)] Title:All a-board: sharing educational data science research with school districts Download a PDF of the paper titled All a-board: sharing educational data science research with school districts, by Nabeel Gillani and Doug Beeferman and Cassandra Overney and Christine Vega-Pourheydarian and Deb Roy Download PDF Abstract: Educational data scientists often conduct research with the hopes of translating findings into...
Local journalism can bring divided communities together Original
Editor’s note: This was originally published by Signposts for the Future of Local News, a project by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and Aspen Digital. The full series of essays is online at aspeninstitute.org/longform/signposts-for-local-news/. We are pulling apart as a nation, with our democracy hanging in the balance. The empirical evidence for deepening social fragmentation and toxic polarization is clear.
How Local Journalism Can Bring Communities Together - Deb Roy
EPILOGUE How Local Journalism Can Bring Communities Together By Deb Roy, Director, MIT Center for Constructive Communication We are pulling apart as a nation, with our democracy hanging in the balance. The empirical evidence for deepening social fragmentation and toxic polarization is clear. The lines of division run along dimensions of race, gender, class, often manifested by political parties pulling farther apart. Alarming survey data from the past year tells the story.
The Internet Needs You-Are-Here Maps
Many of us remember the feeling of running into a museum as a child, excited by the vast space and seemingly infinite possibility of finding that obscure dinosaur, or species of fish, or whatever it was that brought us there. No matter how many times we might have visited the building, seeing the giant museum map with the bright red "you-are-here" sticker was grounding. It even helped us discover new exhibits or other places that we may have glossed over.
[2112.06166] Topic Detection and Tracking with Time-Aware Document Embeddings
[Submitted on 12 Dec 2021 ( v1 ), last revised 26 Mar 2024 (this version, v2)] Title:Topic Detection and Tracking with Time-Aware Document Embeddings View a PDF of the paper titled Topic Detection and Tracking with Time-Aware Document Embeddings, by Hang Jiang and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The time at which a message is communicated is a vital piece of metadata in many real-world natural language processing tasks such as Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT).
Apple - Meet The People That Matter
Once the brainchild of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne – Apple Inc. has now been handed down to an equally innovative team that keeps the ball rolling. We bring to you the key players of this tech giant.
"It’s not about writing some new code or a new piece of policy. Change also involves shifts in human behavior."
Interview with Deb Roy, Associate Professor at MIT Alexander Görlach: We have been seeing a lot of discussions lately about what extent social media such as Twitter is responsible for opinion silos and the fragmentation of society. What do you make of this this claim in general? Deb Roy: We can generalize the category to other social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, etc. My belief is that they are a causal factor. They are not the whole story, but they are an important part of the story.
RadioTalk: a large-scale corpus of talk radio transcripts
Authors:Doug Beeferman, William Brannon, Deb Roy (Submitted on 16 Jul 2019) Abstract: We introduce RadioTalk, a corpus of speech recognition transcripts sampled from talk radio broadcasts in the United States between October of 2018 and March of 2019. The corpus is intended for use by researchers in the fields of natural language processing, conversational analysis, and the social sciences.
Let’s gather around the “digital hearth – Trust, Media and Democracy – Medium
Let’s gather around the “digital hearth” How Cortico and MIT are using technology to foster community conversations in an age of polarization by Deb Roy, Russell Stevens, Eugene Yi and Katherine Cramer Technology has potential to bring us closer together, but we’re experiencing quite the opposite: a world where people are splintered by technology into insular tribes where hateful discourse, false news, and extremism flourish.
Television’s Future Has a Social Soundtrack
When movies were first introduced in the late 1800’s, they were silent. Three decades later, the invention of synchronized soundtracks satisfied our natural desire to hear what is seen. Soundtracks unleashed a wave of creativity in filmmaking that transformed the audience experience. ET would not be the same without the famous score. Jaws would just be a silly robotic fish rather than a movie that kept people out of the water. Today, it’s hard to imagine movies without sound. Sound made movies whole.
AI’s growing impact
Burgeoning data analyzed by ever more intelligent machines are opening pathways to surprising applications and providing solutions to problems that have been out of reach. In the film industry, machines “watch” movies and videos, charting their emotional intensity and giving content creators clues about to how to make stories more appealing.
The spread of true and false news online
Foundational theories of decision-making (1–3), cooperation (4), communication (5), and markets (6) all view some conceptualization of truth or accuracy as central to the functioning of nearly every human endeavor. Yet, both true and false information spreads rapidly through online media. Defining what is true and false has become a common political strategy, replacing debates based on a mutually agreed on set of facts. Our economies are not immune to the spread of falsity either.
The Spread of True and False News Online – MIT Media Lab
Abstract: We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified, true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise around 126K stories tweeted by approximately 3M people over 4.5M times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95-98% agreement on the classifications.
Me, My Echo Chamber, and I: Introspection on Social Media Polarization
Abstract: Homophily --- our tendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world --- is both a part of human nature and an organizing principle underpinning many of our digital social networks.
AI in storytelling: Machines as cocreators
Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will. Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016. Set in a dystopian world with mass unemployment, the movie attracted many fans, with one viewer describing it as amusing but strange. But the most notable aspect of the film involves its creation: an artificial-intelligence (AI) bot wrote Sunspring’s screenplay. “Wow,” you think.
16 Reasons Why Sagittarians Make The Best Friends Ever
Sagittarians are great people. And above that, they are great, great companions. Here are some real good reasons why Sagittarians make the best friends ever! If you're a Sagittarian, this will make your day. If you're not, well, this will make you want to be surrounded by them all your life. 1. Admit it or not, Sagittarians are the life of every party. They infuse energy wherever they go. 2. There can be no dull moment around a Sagittarian.
Confused by what’s happening in the US elections? This machine could help
Since Brexit, the Colombia peace agreement referendum, and an array of “surprising” election results in Greece, Austria, Philippines, France and Germany, that’s the question everyone has been asking. In November, Americans will cast their votes in the US presidential election.
Our Transparent Future
More than half a billion years ago a spectacularly creative burst of biological innovation called the Cambrian explosion occurred. In a geologic “instant” of several million years, organisms developed strikingly new body shapes, new organs, and new predation strategies and defenses against them.
How Digital Transparency Became a Force of Nature
More than half a billion years ago a spectacularly creative burst of biological innovation called the Cambrian explosion occurred. In a geologic “instant” of several million years, organisms developed strikingly new body shapes, new organs, and new predation strategies and defenses against them.
The birth of a word
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MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son’s First Words, Graphs It
In a talk soon to grab several million views on TED.com, cognitive scientist Deb Roy Wednesday shared a remarkable experiment that hearkens back to an earlier era of science using brand-new technology. From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear.
AI in storytelling: Machines as cocreators
Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016. Set in a dystopian world with mass unemployment, the movie attracted many fans, with one viewer describing it as amusing but strange. But the most notable aspect of the film involves its creation: an artificial-intelligence (AI) bot wrote Sunspring’s screenplay. Stay current on your favorite topics “Wow,” you think.
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