CCC - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Advisor ( Cortico )
Senior Advisor Allen Gorin, who passed away on October 14, 2023, led groundbreaking research in the field of natural language processing during a 21-year career at AT&T, and then, after the tragedy of 9/11, as director of the Human Language Technology Research Lab at the U.S. Department of Defence. His work in automated language understanding systems led to breakthroughs that advanced the understanding of how computers can understand human speech and helped pave the way for today's voice recognition platforms. He was awarded the AT&T Science and Technology Medal in 2002 and named an IEEE Fellow in 2005. His longstanding connection to MIT, and specifically to CCC Director Deb Roy, dated back to Roy's graduate student days, and continued for many years as he served as a generous mentor to both Roy and his students, and as a key figure in creating the intellectual foundation for CCC.
Job Titles:
- Entrepreneur - in - Residence
- Founder of Whose Metaverse
CCC's entrepreneur-in-residence, Amar C. Bakshi, founded Shared_Studios, a social impact company connecting people across distance and difference as if in the same room via life-size audiovisual environments called Portals. Over half a million people have used Portals in 100 locations across 30 countries. These installations exist in a variety of locations, from refugee camps to public parks, and have been set up in partnership with institutions such as the United Nations, the Smithsonian, and Google. Portals have garnered significant media attention (including a PBS documentary) and attracted the participation of leaders including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Malala Yousafzai. Bakshi also helped launch the Portals Policing Project with Yale and Johns Hopkins researchers, collecting the most extensive first-hand accounts on policing across America. Additionally, he worked with the UN Museum and Cortico to host and analyze the world's largest ever recorded climate action conversation.
Amar is also the founder of Whose Metaverse, a nonprofit advancing digital equity through accessible creator tools and an immersive learning platform. Bakshi's artistic work has been exhibited at institutions including the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. He previously reported for the Washington Post across twelve countries, launched CNN's international analysis site, and worked as Special Assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Amar holds an AB from Harvard University, an MA in international economics from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and a JD from Yale Law School. A Truman Fellow and a Soros Scholar, he resides in Brooklyn.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Assistant
- Assistant
Amy Johnson is an admin assistant at CCC. She has worked as everything from a receptionist to an export coordinator. Most recently, she worked as a barista in a local coffee shop, where she learned more about coffee than she ever wanted to know.
She was born in a tiny upstate New York town, which consisted mostly of trees and cows. She went to Ithaca College, lived in New York City, and moved back upstate before moving to Massachusetts in 2016.
Her main activities are doing the bidding of her cats, tabletop roleplaying games, and reading.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor
- News Executive
Andrew Heyward is a nationally known news executive, award-winning broadcast news producer, and expert on the changing media landscape. .
Heyward currently advises local TV stations on digital strategy. He is also a Research Professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, where he recently completed a 3½ year project writing about innovation in local television news. He is now working on a new initiative developing guidelines to promote fair and accurate journalism in the "post-objectivity" newsroom.
Heyward was President, CBS News, from January 1996-November 2005. Before that, he was executive producer of The CBS Evening News, developed the weekly primetime program 48 Hours, and held other positions at CBS News and in local newsrooms.
Heyward is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard with a degree in History and Literature.
Anneli is a Research Scientist and recent Ph.D. graduate from the Center for Constructive Communication at the MIT Media Lab working on the Clover project. Her academic research focused on the design and study of Learning Loops, a tech-assisted coaching network centered around digital storytelling tools that supports family involvement in children's narrative process and empowers youth voice. Anneli holds a Master's degree from Tufts University in human development and child study, and a Bachelor's degree from San Diego State University in psychology and neuroscience.
Prior to academia she has had a diverse range of experiences working as a therapist, preschool teacher, literacy instructor, tutor, researcher, youth advocate, online literacy curriculum creator, designer, and yoga instructor. Anneli has a passion for cooking, making music, and storytelling.
Job Titles:
- RealTalk Community Fellow 2022 - 23
Job Titles:
- Head of Applied Research
- Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT
Roy is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. He leads research in applied machine learning and human-machine system design with applications in understanding large scale social media ecosystems and designing communication tools and social networks. Deb is also co-founder and CEO of Cortico, a nonprofit social technology organization that develops and operates a conversation platform designed to surface underheard voices and enable deep systematic listening.
Previously, Roy was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School from 2021-22. He served as Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab from 2019-2021. Roy co-founded and was CEO of Bluefin Labs, a media analytics company that analyzed the interactions between television and social media at scale. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013, Twitter's largest acquisition to date. From 2013-2017 Roy served as Twitter's Chief Media Scientist.
Deb serves on the board of the Knight First Amendment Institute and the FRONTLINE advisory council. He has previously served on the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy, the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder.
Roy is the author of over 175 academic papers including a study of the spread of false news that was the cover of Science magazine in 2018 and one of the most influential academic publications of the year. Roy's widely-viewed TED talk Birth of a Word presents his research on his son's language development that led to new ideas in media analytics, while his 2021 talk envisions a new kind of social platform for a stronger democracy.
A native of Canada, Roy received his Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.
Entrepreneur, investor, operator and board member with multiple successful exits. Writer of McDonald's commercials to founder and CEO of Classic Sports Network (ESPN Classic). Co-founder and CEO CSTV (CBS Sports Network). Founding team of Nick-at Nite and Court TV. Investor, advisor, founding team YankeeNets (YES Network). Founding investor and board member Bluefin Labs (Twitter), Co-founder and investor NowThis News (Group Nine), seed investor Akamai, Eko, and Buddy Media (Salesforce). Seed investor and advisor OpenWeb, Happify Health.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Security Technologist
- Senior Advisor ( Harvard University )
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by the Economist. He is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 books - including A Hacker's Mind - as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and AccessNow, and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.
Job Titles:
- Founder of MIT 's CoLab
- Professor of the Practice of Civic Design
Ceasar L. McDowell is a Professor of the Practice of Civic Design at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He was also Associate Director of Civic Design at the Center for Constructive Communication. His current work is on the design of civic infrastructures and processes to connect the increasingly demographically complex public. He co-hosts the WeWhoEngage a podcast series on civic design.
At DUSP, serves as Associate Department Head and teaches on civic and community engagement and the use of social media to enhance both. Ceasar brings his deep commitment to the work of building beloved, just and equitable communities that are able to - as his friend Carl Moore says - "struggle with traditions that bind and the interests that separate in order to build a future that is an equitable improvement on the past."
Ceasar is the founder of MIT's CoLab and Civic Designers consulting. He served as Director of the global civic engagement organization Dropping Knowledge International, President of Interaction Institute for Social Change, co-founder of The Civil Rights Forum on Telecommunications Policy, and founding Board member of The Algebra Project. Ceasar is also a musician, and filmmaker.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor, Development and Strategy ( Cortico )
- Vice President of Development and Strategy at Cortico
Debby Goldberg, Vice President of Development and Strategy at Cortico, is a non-profit executive with over 25 years of experience in fundraising and strategy. She has focused on institutional fundraising, organizational development, and strategic communications, and has served as the first development professional at three start-up non-profit organizations. Most recently, she was the Director of Development and Alumni Relations at Schwarzman Scholars, helping build the organization's infrastructure and alumni network. Previously, Debby was Vice President for Development at ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom focused on investigative reporting, and Senior Vice President for Development at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC. Debby received her MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard College.
Job Titles:
- Lead Software Engineer
- Prototype Engineering Staff Member
I'm an engineer and excited to build software to bring us together. I know many of you from my previous stint at the Media Lab and at Bluefin Labs and looking forward to collaborating with the team at large. Previously, I've worked in genetics, oncology, neuroscience, and social media with a focus on visualization and hope my experiences in these disparate domains can spark ideas at the CCC. In my free time (and in general), I love learning and have a penchant for collecting hobbies-most recently beekeeping, ceramics, and piano transcription. Please reach out to say hi!
Job Titles:
- Head of Translational Research
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( Kennedy School of Government, Harvard )
As Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, Marshall Ganz teaches, researches, and writes on leadership, narrative, strategy and organization in social movements, civic associations, and politics. He grew up in Bakersfield, California where his father was a Rabbi and his mother, a teacher. He entered Harvard College in the fall of 1960. He left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. He found a "calling" as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in the fall of 1965 joined Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers. During 16 years with the United Farm Workers he gained experience in union, political, and community organizing; became Director of Organizing; and was elected to the national executive board on which he served for 8 years. During the 1980s he worked with grassroots groups to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and after a 28-year "leave of absence" completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He was awarded an MPA by the Kennedy School in 1993 and completed his PhD in sociology in 2000. He has published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, American Prospect, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review and elsewhere. His newest book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement was published in 2009, earning the Michael J. Harrington Book Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2007-8 he was instrumental in design of the grassroots organization for the 2008 Obama for President campaign. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Episcopal Divinity School. In association with the global Leading Change Network of organizers, researchers and educators he coaches, trains, and advises social, civic, educational, health care, and political groups on organizing, training, and leadership development around the world.
Job Titles:
- Communications Strategist
Ellen Hoffman, former director of communications at the Media Lab, has been a staff member at the Lab for 25 years. She works on communications for CCC, as well as on the Media Lab archive. After receiving her master's of journalism from Boston University, she began her writing career at MIT's News Office. She has written for the Harvard School of Public Health; Health Care International, Scotland; and Brigham and Women's Hospital, and is the author of Rock the Casbah. She serves on the board of directors for the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation and is a past member of GBH's Community Advisory Board. In her spare time, she studies Italian and plays tennis and poker.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( Texas Tribune )
Job Titles:
- Head of Operations and Administration
Jad is a research scientist at CCC. He received his PhD in Computer Science in May 2022 from McGill University and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). Before that, he received his Masters from McGill University in 2014 and Bachelors from the American University of Beirut in 2011. His PhD research was in the broad area of Natural Language Processing, specifically, at the intersection of computational pragmatics and natural language generation and natural language understanding.
At CCC, Jad is leading the research effort on using Generative AI for community conversation understanding at scale. He's also working on investigating the abilities of LLMs to communicate to different audiences through storytelling, and on LLM personalization to reflect different personality profiles, in addition to working on joint modeling of text and graph data.
In his PhD, Jad worked on the computational modeling of presuppositions in natural language. Presuppositions are shared assumptions and facts that are not explicitly stated in the context (either in texts or conversations) and are taken for granted. For example, if we say in a conversation "Roger Federer won the match", we presuppose he played a match (which we won) but that fact is not explicitly stated. In his PhD, Jad presented various neural models for learning presupposition effects in language (e.g., definite descriptions, adverbial presuppositions) and showed how we can use such models to improve the quality of extractive summaries. He also investigated large transformer-based models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) in the context of NLI to understand how well they perform on hard cases of presupposition as well as presenting learning frameworks to help improve their performance on such hard cases. His work was recognized with the ACL 2018 Best Paper Award and COLING 2022 Best Short Paper Award.
When not at CCC, you can probably find him at the MIT Zesiger Center lifting weights! Jad is also a big fan of The Office and thinks it is the best show ever (yes, better than Friends!).
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( Professor, New York University Stern School of Business )
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor
- Management and Negotiation Analysis Expert
Joshua Flax is CCC's conflict management and negotiation analysis expert-in-residence. For over 20 years he served as a federal mediator at the U.S. government's Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service (FMCS), having recently completed his Federal service as the agency's deputy director for policy & strategy.
Flax was an early adopter of technology-enhanced mediation approaches and has joined CCC to conduct applied research in this space and help to develop more sophisticated technology improvements with the potential to help negotiators optimize outcomes at the bargaining table and avoid or resolve protracted conflict.
At FMCS, Flax mediated collective bargaining conflict for employers and unions in manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, telecommunications, entertainment, and school districts. His practice grew to include leading mediation teams tackling some of the most difficult public policy negotiations between the Federal government and public stakeholder groups, including national rail negotiations between Amtrak, the Federal Rail Administration, and 23 state-owned passenger railroad systems. He has also led mediation of some of the largest Federal-Tribal negotiations, such as those between the U.S. Department of Transportation and tribal negotiators representing all 574 Federally recognized Native American tribes.
Flax completed his graduate work and teaching fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2001, where he served on the faculty from 2013-2016, and continues to lecture on negotiation, collective bargaining, mediation, and tribal sustainable development negotiation processes with Federal and state governments.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( Twitter )
Leila is a Cambridge native who now calls Boston home. With a background in business and event planning, she has a talent for transforming ideas into unforgettable experiences. Leila is a serial volunteer, dedicating her time and skills to various community initiatives. During her free time, she immerses herself in the arts and nature.
Lorena is the project coordinator for the Center for Constructive Communication. In this role, she leads the project management for Real Talk for Change. She is passionate about the impact storytelling can make on public policy, particularly around health equity, public education and infrastructure.
Lorena has been at MIT for 10 years and prior to joining CCC at the Media Lab she worked at MIT's Office of Minority Education and the Priscilla King Gray Center for Public Service. In her spare time, she volunteers with local organizations focused on advancing immigrant workers' rights in the Boston area.
Job Titles:
- RealTalk Community Fellow 2021 - 22
Maggie designs technologies and systems informed by the human practices that contribute to a functioning deliberative democracy, such as dialogue and community organizing. In her PhD, she explores different methods of data collection, analysis, visualization, and action that are informed by these practices. Using participatory methods for design research, including codesign and participatory action research, Maggie partners with local community members and organizers in her work. Currently in the Center for Constructive Communication, she works on research related to the Real Talk project for which she co-lead participatory sensemaking and now codesigns data analysis processes and visualizations in Boston.
With a specific focus on computer supported cooperative work, Maggie has published in CHI, CSCW, and HICSS. In recent years, she has hosted workshops at the intersection of community organizing and technology at CSCW to support researchers in studying the craft and technologists and academics in practicing it. She has been a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy school with Marshall Ganz for Organizing: People Power Change, and has been the head teaching assistant and co-course-designer for Designing Constructive Communication Systems at the Media Lab.
For her master's thesis, Maggie dove into an ethnographic study of facilitation methods such as Circle practice (used commonly in abolitionist and anti-mass incarceration movements) and designed Keeper, an online facilitation scaffolding informed by the study. Before that, her research primarily focused on and continues to be motivated be growing political fragmentation in the US, a subject personally meaningful to her.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( E. a. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and Vice President for Research at MIT )
Job Titles:
- RealTalk Community Fellow 2021 - 22
Job Titles:
- Program Manager
- Program Manager at the MIT
As a Program Manager at the MIT CCC, Marina Rakhilin works within translational research to bring ideas into the real world. Marina brings experience in human-centered design, community-based participatory research methods, and social work for a unique perspective on constructive communication. Previously, Marina has coordinated research projects focused on a variety of behavior-change processes-sometimes exploring how to change behavioral patterns that reinforce symptoms of depression or how healthcare providers can incorporate tenets of cultural humility to better engage with marginalized populations. Marina has a BS in Clinical Psychology from Tufts University and a Master of Social Work degree from Boston College.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( Harvard Law School )
As Senior Administrative Assistant, Matthew brings an operational background rooted in experiences with fast-moving organizations both public and private. He began his career in politics and campaigns, working as a community organizer in New Hampshire and in several capacities for then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg, including Field Director and Political Director for Pete for South Bend.
Matthew strongly believes in the power of community as a solution to complex problems, and this conviction most recently led him to work in residential real estate, running the listing department for a large luxury team in Manhattan Beach, CA.
He grew up in Spartanburg, SC, and attended the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated with a degree in Political Science.
Outside of work, Matthew has a passion for coaching youth basketball at the club level, cheering for the Fighting Irish (among several devoted fandoms across sports) on the football field, and attempting to keep pace with his excitable dog, Kemba.
Job Titles:
- Prototype Engineering Staff Member
- Prototype Manager
Job Titles:
- Secretary of the Board of Directors for Brown Broadcasting Service
- Writer, Digital Artist, and Designer
Naana is a writer, digital artist, and designer currently pursuing her Master's at the MIT Media Lab/CCC as an Amazon Robotics Day One Fellow. She graduated from Brown University with a BA in English, nonfiction writing. Her past interests in journalism, entertainment, and narrative history have since evolved into a focus on the effects of social technologies on discourse, development, and the dissemination of information. Her research interests also include equitable design and persuasive technologies. Previously, as an Operations Associate at Meta, she built frameworks and automated processes to better support academic researchers, digital publishers, and creators.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of Letters & Science
- Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
Katherine Cramer is Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters & Science and Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also a visiting professor at the Center for Constructive Communication. Her work focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics and their connections to each other and to their governments. Cramer is known for her innovative approach to the study of public opinion, in which she uses methods such as inviting herself into the conversations of groups of people to listen to the way they understand public affairs. She is the author of three solo-authored books, including The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, which has been a go-to resource for understanding the rural vs. urban divide in the United States and around the globe. She is a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters; the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for which she is currently co-chairing the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( Thomas a. Frank - 1977 - Professor of Physics, MIT )
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Journalist - in - Residence
Job Titles:
- Head of Programs ( Co - Founder Cortico )
Job Titles:
- Head of Program Management
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( Cofounder & CTO, Inrupt Prof. Post Tenure, CSAIL / MIT )
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Job Titles:
- RealTalk Community Fellow 2021 - 22
Job Titles:
- RealTalk Community Fellow 2022 - 23
Job Titles:
- Chairman of Letters & Science
- Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Senior Advisor ( the Aspen Institute )
Job Titles:
- Head of Engineering
- Prototype Engineering Staff Member
Wes has been coding and running engineering teams for 20 years spanning fintech, music, and media analytics. Now at CCC, he focuses on bringing advanced NLP and machine learning methods to real world deployments. In his spare time he tries to sleep.