Investing in MIT’s new Laboratory for Social Machines

Today, @MIT announced the creation of the Laboratory for Social Machines, funded by a five-year, $10 million commitment from Twitter. Through @Gnip, MIT will also have access to our full stream of public Tweets and complete corpus of historical public Tweets, starting with Jack Dorsey’s first Tweet in 2006.

This is an exciting step for all of us at Twitter as we continue to develop new ways to support the research community. Building on the success of the Twitter Data Grants program, which attracted more than 1,300 applications, we remain committed to making public Twitter data available to researchers, instructors and students. We’ve already seen Twitter data being used in everything from epidemiology to natural disaster response.

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.

We look forward to the innovative research generated by the Laboratory for Social Machines and to further increasing Twitter’s footprint in the research community. For more information about the Laboratory for Social Machines, please visit socialmachines.media.mit.edu.