Twitter on Wednesday announced that it has offered $10 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an investment for the development of a new research lab that will work to understand how people communicate and share online on Twitter and other social media platforms.
The new MIT lab, named as the “Laboratory of Social Machines,” will focus on the development of new technologies to make sense of semantic and social patterns across the broad span of public mass media, social media, data streams, and digital content.
According to MIT, the lab’s main goal is to create new platforms for both individuals and institutions to identify, discuss, and act on pressing societal problems. MIT Researchers will access content available on Twitter, Reddit and other online forums to build new communication tools that journalists, policy experts and researchers can use to explore new patterns and trends.
Announcing the investment, Twitter Chief Dick Costolo said that with this investment the social network wants to go deeper into research to better understand what role Twitter and other platforms play in the way people communicate, the effect that rapid and fluid communication can have and apply those findings to deal with complex societal issues. Twitter will be making the $10 million investment over a 5-year period.
Deb Roy, Twitter’s chief media scientist and an associate professor at the Media Lab, will lead the LSM. The LSM will have full operational and academic independence in its research.
As a part of the investment deal, MIT will access data from Twitter-owned website Gnip also that stores and sells vast database of historic tweets. The microblogging giant has previously offered smaller sums of funding to academic institutions in a pilot project known as “Twitter Data Grants” introduced in February.
