Community Listening with AI with Deb Roy and Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou
When:
Tuesday, Mar 11, 2025 1:00p -
4:00p
Tuesday, Mar 11, 2025 1:00p -
4:00p
Where:
MIT Museum
314 Main Street, Gambrill Center, Building E-28
Cambridge, MA 02142
Admission:
$20-30
Hosted by:
Categories:
Classes, Tech
Event website:
https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/programs/masterclass-series-at-the-mit-museum
In this masterclass we will examine why trust is declining, how people decide what to believe, and strategies to rebuild the critical connection between society and science. We'll share ideas for how to counteract this erosion and safeguard our democracy. Through interactive discussions and review of a variety of use cases, you'll discover how to create meaningful spaces for curiosity, conversation, and trust. Deb Roy is a professor of Media Arts and Science at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). As the Head of Translational Research at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou leads sociotechnical research at the intersection of dialogue, technology, and design.
About the Instructors:
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.
While on leave from MIT, 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, Twitter’s largest acquisition to date. 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.
A native of Canada, Deb was born and raised in Winnipeg and spent large parts of his childhood in Calcutta. He received his Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.
As the Head of Translational Research at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou leads sociotechnical research at the intersection of dialogue, technology, and design. By bringing deep expertise in participatory methods, qualitative analysis, and design research, she focuses on the design, prototyping, and advancement of social dialogue technologies and oversees the transfer of research methods, tools, and systems to practice and deployment.
Dimitra also holds a tenured Assistant Professor’s position (currently on leave) at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 – the European Union’s flagship initiative for Research & Innovation – Dimitra was a Marie Curie Global Fellow (joint visiting appointment at MIT and the University of Zurich, Switzerland) from 2019 to mid-2022, focusing on studying vaccine misinformation.
Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Digital Journalism, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Media, War & Conflict, South European Society and Politics, and Critical Discourse Studies. She currently serves as an International Liaison for the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association.
Register for this masterclass here.
