An Evening with Deb Roy

In this special MIT Center for Corunstctive Communications (CCC) event, CCC Director and MIT Professor Deb Roy will present an overview of research activities at CCC and how these ideas are being translated into practice with an emerging focus on the deployment of tech-enhanced dialogue to help colleges and universities transition into “listening campuses.”

Following the presentation, there will be Q&A moderated by and in conversation with Lindsay Androski ’98 and member of the MIT Corporation.

Hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served.

In the United States and beyond, spaces for constructive discourse have withered under the pressures of a tech-saturated, often toxic, media environment. This includes social media distortion, amplification of outrage, and the spread of disinformation. Yet we know that trustworthy communication channels are essential for democracies, communities, and institutions to function. Informed by years of social media and media analytics, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) combines dialogue, listening, and deliberation practices with emerging digital technologies to address this. In times of change, such as the upcoming government transition, this work becomes even more critical.

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Deb Roy is professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). He leads research in designing human-AI systems that foster dialogue, listening, and deliberation in ways that build civic muscle. Roy is also co-founder and unpaid CEO of Cortico, a closely affiliated nonprofit collaborator of CCC that develops, operates and supports a conversation platform designed to surface underheard voices and perspectives and create scalable dialogue networks.

Roy serves on the board of the Knight First Amendment Institute, the FRONTLINE advisory council, and is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Previously, Roy was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2021-22), and served as executive director of the MIT Media Lab (2019-2021), where CCC is based. He has served on the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy and the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder.

Roy co-founded and was 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. From 2013-2017 Roy served as Twitter’s chief media scientist.

Roy is the author of over 185 academic papers including a study of the spread of false news that was the cover story of Science magazine in 2018 and cited as one of the most influential academic publications of the year. His 2023 essay in The Atlantic describes his journey from studying social media to creating dialogue networks, and his 2024 Atlantic essay explores ways to tackle truth decay. Roy’s widely viewed TED talk Birth of a Word presents his pioneering research on his son’s language development that led to new ideas in media analytics.

He received his Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.