Deb Roy

Deb Roy is a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. His work focuses on designing AI systems to foster civic dialogue and reduce misinformation. Previously, he served as Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab (2019–2021), co-founded Bluefin Labs (acquired by Twitter in 2013), and held roles as Twitter’s Chief Media Scientist (2013–2017). He earned his PhD from MIT and a Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo.

Education:

• PhD in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT
• Bachelor of Applied Science, University of Waterloo

Research Interests:

• Human-AI systems for constructive dialogue
• Mitigating information disorder
• Designing scalable conversation networks
• AI ethics and civic technology

Recent Article Trends: Focus on misinformation dynamics, civic infrastructure, and scalable dialogue systems. Recent work includes Conversation Networks (2025) proposing alternatives to social media platforms, and How to Tackle Truth Decay (2024) advocating for systemic solutions to misinformation.

Awards & Recognition: Over 185 academic publications, including a Science cover story on misinformation (2018). Notable for TED Talk Birth of a Word (2011) on language acquisition.

Advising & Governance: Serves on boards of the Knight First Amendment Institute and FRONTLINE. Advised the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder and the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy.

Labs & Initiatives: MIT CCC focuses on constructive communication. Co-founded Cortico, a nonprofit building dialogue platforms to amplify underheard voices.