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.
“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.
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.
Nathan Matias, Ph.D. student at the MIT Center for Civic Media, will lead a discussion at the Mozilla Festival in London on creating better online social interactions, writes Steve Annear for Boston Magazine. “Hopefully we will be able to create a guide to partying on the Internet,” says Matias.
BetaBoston reporter Nidhi Subbaraman writes about the new MIT Connect website, the Institute’s social media hub. “It’s trying to give you a feeling like you’re right there on campus,” says Stephanie Leishman.
Shannon McMahon reports for Boston.com about a new course, offered through MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, focused on social media and online forums like Reddit.
Boston Magazine reporter Steve Annear writes about the course being offered at MIT this spring on the complexities of social media and online forums like Reddit. “They are social and political objects shaped by people that then shape the people who use them,” Chris Peterson, an MIT researcher, admissions officer and co-leader of forums like Reddit.
Professor Renee Richardson Gosline writes about the Market Basket strike and the role social media has played. Social media, Richardson argues, has increased consumer influence and involvement in the crisis.
“They've created an app which recasts mediocre headshots in the styles of famous portrait photographers like Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus- and in the process reveals how subtle shifts in lighting can completely change the way we perceive a face,” writes Boston Globe reporter Kevin Hartnett.
Gill Plimmer of The Financial Times interviews Professor Graham Jones about how social media has influenced how people gossip. “English speakers are increasingly talking not just about what other people say and do, but about the thoughts and feelings behind their words,” writes Plimmer.
Steve Lohr writes for The New York Times about Luminoso, a text analysis and artificial intelligence startup out of the MIT Media Lab. Luminoso analyzed social media communications before, during, and after the U.S.-Germany World Cup soccer match to create a minute-by-minute picture of peoples’ emotions.
MIT researchers have helped to produce an algorithm that applies professional photograph editing to self-portraits, writes Billy Steele for Engadget. The software uses existing works to make a match with the captured image, explains grad student YiChang Shih.