Twitter has announced a new academic partnership with MIT that includes a five-year $10 million commitment to a new Laboratory for Social Machines. The university will also have access, via Twitter’s own Gnip data firm, to all public tweets ever sent.
The new lab will focus on building technology in two areas: “grounded semantics and network analysis” and “pattern discovery, data visualization, and mobile app technologies.” Here’s Twitter’s own description of how MIT will use its data:
The Laboratory for Social Machines anticipates using Twitter data to investigate the rapidly changing and intersecting worlds of news, government and collective action. The hope is that their research team will be able to understand how movements are started by better understanding how information spreads on Twitter.
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