Setting the trend on Social TV

Social TV. It is not a new TV. That term refers to the trend where TV viewers are tweeting about what they are watching. It could be Oscars or a cricket match. You can always find a parallel social conversation on the Twitter about whatever programme is running on TV. Twitter wants to tap into that social TV market, analyse the data generated by users which in turn can be turned into dollars. To that effect it bought Bluefin Labs which puts ‘new and actionable analytics at the fingertips of brands, agencies, and TV networks’ for a whopping $100 million. The co-founder, chief scientist and chairman of Bluefin is Deb Roy, who is also a tenured member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty. A native of Canada, Roy has a Bachelor of Computer Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD from the MIT in Artificial Intelligence and Psychology. For the past 14 years, he has been a tenured member of the renowned institution’s faculty and has led ground-breaking research on ‘understanding and modeling human communication using big data’, through researching natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive sciences. Presently on leave from MIT, he is the force behind Bluefin Labs where he is using the research from MIT to drive the social TV analytics company. He is also a frequent speaker at industry and academic events. One of his famous TED talks garnered millions of views.