Sinan Kayhan Aral

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.

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 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 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.

Sinan Aral and Simon Johnson were each awarded the 2017 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, established to honor educational innovation and excellence. The Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching Award is the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the School. The award was established in 2006 and is awarded each year to two MIT Sloan faculty members, as well as two electrical engineering and computer science faculty members, for their contributions to educational excellence at MIT.