Sinan Aral

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Sinan Aral is a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur, and venture capitalist who is ranked among the top 50 management scholars in the world and was rated the World’s “Top Digital Thinker” in 2021. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a founding partner at the venture capital firms Manifest Capital and Milemark Capital. He has been called “one of the first and most prescient scholars of social media” by former U.S. Undersecretary of State Richard Stengle.

Sinan was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the advisory boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil.

His research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, and the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor). In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.” In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline, and his TED talk on “Protecting Truth in the Age of Misinformation,” which received over two million views in nine months, set the stage for today’s modern solutions to the misinformation crisis.

Sinan’s first book, The Hype Machine, which was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED, a 2020 Porchlight Best “Big Ideas and New Perspectives” Book Award Winner and among the Best New Technology Books and Best New Economy Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority, became an instant classic.

Sinan earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard University. You can find him on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

Honors

Thinkers50 recognizes Aral

Aral wins Herbert Simon Award

"Fake news" research among the most discussed papers of 2018

Sinan Aral honored with best paper award

Aral and Eckles win for a working paper

Aral’s efforts to address “fake news” recognized

Sinan Aral appointed to Scientific Advisory Board

Publications

"​Reducing Interference Bias in Online Marketplace Pricing Experiments."

Holtz, David, Ruben Lobel, Inessa Liskovich, and Sinan K. Aral. Management Science. Forthcoming. arXiv Preprint.

"Targeting for Long Term Outcomes."

Yang, Jeremy, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon, and Sinan K. Aral. Management Science. Forthcoming. arXiv Preprint.

"Understanding the Returns to Integrated Enterprise Systems: The Impacts of Agile and Phased Implementation Strategies."

Wang, Hongchang, Sinan K. Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, Chris Gu, and Duncan J. Wu. Management Information Systems Quarterly. Forthcoming.

"Are Blockchain Ecosystems Centralizing or Decentralizing? A Framework for Longitudinal Analysis."

Ju, Harang, Madhav Kumar, Ehsan Valavi, and Sinan K. Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6972-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2023.

"Information Rules Revisited."

Ju, Harang, Madhav Kumar, Ehsan Valavi, and Sinan K. Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6974-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2023.

"Measuring Social Media Network Effects: Evidence from Online Choice Experiments."

Aral, Sinan K., Seth G. Benzell, Avinash Collis, and Christos Nicolaides, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6975-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2023.

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