Sinan Kayhan Aral

Support Staff

Aileen Menounos

(617) 253-4936
aileenrm@mit.edu

About🔗

Academic Groups

Academic Area

Management Science

Centers & Initiatives

MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

Sinan Aral 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 the MIT Social Analytics Lab, and a founding partner at Manifest Capital.

He 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 Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. Sinan was the Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Times in 2013 and has worked closely with Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, Yahoo, AirBnB, Jet.com, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from big data analytics, social media investments and machine learning research.

Sinan’s research and teaching have won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor), and more than ten best paper awards conferred by his colleagues in research. In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40” and in 2018 became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary.

In 2018, Sinan published what Altmetrics called the second most influential scientific publication of the year on the “Spread of False News Online,” on the cover of Science. His TED talk on Protecting Truth in the Age of Misinformation has been viewed over two million times and his upcoming book The Hype Machine, about how social media is disrupting our elections, our economies and our lives, has been praised as a "breathtaking" and “brilliant” “masterpiece” by experts in the field.

Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, holds Master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard University, and received his PhD from MIT.

He enjoys cooking, skiing and telling jokes about his own cooking and skiing. His most recent hobby is learning from his seven-year-old son. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

Honors🔗

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

Sinan Aral’s paper “The Spread of True and False News Online” (co-authored with Deb Roy and Soroush Vosoughi, both at MIT Media Lab), which was published on the cover of Science in March, has not only made the Top 10 of the Altmetric Top 100 list; it has been ranked by Altmetric as the second-most-talked-about academic paper of 2018 in any scientific discipline. In order to more fully capture the influence and reach of scholarly work and identify research generating significant international online attention and discussion, Altmetric tracks many distinct sources, including—in addition to a scholarly citation database—public-policy papers, news articles, blogs, syllabi, and social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The ranking was announced in “The most discussed and shared scientific research of 2018.” Aral’s paper was given an Altmetric Attention Score of 8646, with details here.

Aral’s efforts to address “fake news” recognized

Sinan Aral has won the 2018 Fellows Choice Award (Academic division), an Excellence in New Communications Award from the Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR). These awards honor the work of innovative organizations and individuals “who are advancing the use of digital and social media, mobile media, collaborative technologies, virtual reality, and other emerging digital technologies to improve business, media, health, law, culture, and society.” Fellows Choice Award winners were chosen by SNCR Fellows this year for their “exemplary effort to address fake news.” Aral’s winning paper, co-authored with Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy (both at the MIT Media Lab in the Laboratory for Social Machines), is entitled “The Spread of True and False News Online.” NCR, a research and education institution dedicated to the advanced study of how new and emerging communications tools and technologies are affecting business, media, health, law, culture, and society, is part of The Conference Board, a global, independent business membership and research association working to provide the world’s leading organizations with the practical knowledge needed to improve performance and better serve society.

Aral wins Herbert Simon Award

Sinan Aral has been honored with the 2017 Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College for Advanced Studies in Budapest, Hungary, where members of the college study economics, business, and social sciences. The economics students there established the John von Neumann Award in 1995, and the business students established the Herbert Simon Award (named after Nobel laureate Herbert Simon) in 2005. The College Assembly who voted for Aral cited the way he combines “outstanding research with real-life experience,” noting that his “groundbreaking thoughts in the fields of social commerce, information diffusion in social networks and big data applications would inspire us and improve our thinking on how technology shapes the world’s business environment.” Aral will formally receive the award in 2018 when he visits Rajk László College to give a public presentation and a college seminar.

Sinan Aral honored with best paper award

Sinan Aral has won the Network Science Best Paper Award, sponsored by the Indiana University Network Science Institute. This first-ever award was chosen by the editors from all papers published in the first four volumes of the journal, from 2013 to 2016. Aral’s winning paper, co-authored with Lev Muchnik (Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Business Administration senior lecturer) and Arun Sundararajan (New York University Stern School of Business professor), is entitled “Engineering Social Contagions: Optimal Network Seeding in the Presence of Homophily.”

Sinan Aral appointed to Scientific Advisory Board

Sinan Aral has been appointed to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute in London — the British national institute for data science, headquartered at the British Library. Created in 2015 by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and five founding universities (Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, University College London, and Warwick), the Institute’s mission is “to make great leaps in data science research in order to change the world for the better.” The seven-member Scientific Advisory Board, an independent group which will provide strategic advice to the institute’s Board of Trustees and leadership team on its research program, includes experts from organizations around the world in academia, industry, and government, with a diverse range of skills and specializations spanning privacy, machine learning, engineering, microeconomics, and entrepreneurship.

Publications🔗

Google Scholar

The Hype Machine.

Aral, Sinan K. New York, NY: Random House LLC, Forthcoming.

"Interdependence and the Cost of Uncoordinated Responses to COVID-19."

Holtz, David, Michael Zhao, Seth G. Benzell, Cathy Y. Cao, M. Amin Rahimian, Jeremy Yang, Jennifer Allen, Avinash Collis, Alex Moehring, Tara Sowrirajan, Dipayan Ghosh, Yunhao Zhang, Paramveer S. Dhillon, Christos Nicolaides, Dean Eckles, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6111-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2020.