Paris – Deb Roy (@dkroy), Chief Media Scientist, Twitter, will present a keynote address at MIPTV in Cannes on April 8.

The keynote will highlight Twitter as a force multiplier for TV viewing. Studies show that a majority of mobile and tablet users talk about what they’re watching on television with others in real time. This results in unprecedented waves of synchronous conversations about culture and events that Deb Roy calls “the social soundtrack for TV”. When viewers watch TV together with Twitter instead of time-shifting or watching alone, Twitter can increase the impact and reach of both the programme and the advertiser’s message. Deb Roy will share his views on what this means for TV networks, advertisers and creatives.

Roy is Twitter’s Chief Media Scientist, and a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He conducts research at the MIT Media Lab on language, games, and social dynamics at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. In 2008 he co-founded and was the founding CEO of Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company, which MIT Technology Review named as one of the 50 most innovative companies of 2012. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013.

An author of over 100 academic papers in machine learning, cognitive modelling, and human-machine interaction, his TED talk, Birth of a Word, has been viewed over 2.5 million times. A native of Canada, Roy received a Bachelor of Applied Science (computer engineering) from the University of Waterloo and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.