Twitter's New Chief Media Scientist Gets Social TV

When his son was born, Deb Roy SM ’95, PhD ’99 did more that take a few home videos. A cognitive scientist and Media Lab faculty member, Roy installed ceiling cameras in every room of his home and recorded 8-10 hours a day for three years. The resulting 90,000 hours of video became The Birth of a Word, a research project that revealed the tot's intimate steps to language. And that project led to his current role as Twitter's chief media scientist.

In Roy's 2011 TED talk covered in an earlier Slice post, he describes how his team tamed the deluge of video by turning data into vivid graphics and providing new tools for analysis. The next step was to applying the new tools to television through Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics startup he founded with Michael Fleischman PhD '08 and former Media Lab director Frank Moss SM '72, PhD '77 in 2008.

Deb Roy's Cognitive Machines group

Bluefin used the new tools to capture real-time social media responses to television programs. "TV is being transformed from a one-way mass medium to a kind of massive, interactive medium of a sort that we haven't seen before," Roy says.

A Boston Globe video shows the team examining tweets and Facebook posts to ferret out message volume, sentiment, and topics during the second Obama-Romney presidential debate. Unlike Nielsen ratings, which could reveal how many households were tuned in to the event, Bluefin could detect how people felt about it. For example, they spotted the huge activity spike when Romney mentioned he had "binders full of women" for potential appointments in his administration.

In February Twitter bought Bluefin and named Roy as chief media scientist, a post he will use to study Twitter, its relationship to other media, and to guide company strategy. Roy predicts that combining social media and TV will be as powerful a transformation as combining sound and film. Twitter is a "force multiplier for TV viewing." Roy talks about the second screen phenomenon in a video interview conducted by The Guardian.

You can follow Roy on Twitter.