The Social Media Summit@MIT (SMS@MIT)

• Devin Cook – Associate Director, MIT IDE
• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

• Frances Haugen – Facebook Whistleblower
• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

Former Facebook data scientist, Frances Haugen, who last year disclosed tens of thousands of Facebook documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal shares her compelling insights in a fireside chat with MIT IDE Director and author of The Hype Machine, Sinan Aral. Among other topics, the session will examine how “we can have social media we enjoy that brings out the best in humanity.”

• David Rand – Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, and MIT IDE
• Renée DiResta – Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory
• Senator Rebecca L. Rausch – Massachusetts State Senator, Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex District
• Duncan Watts – Professor, University of Pennsylvania

The spread of misinformation and “fake news” has become a major cause of concern in recent years, and much of this concern has been focused on social media. In this session, we will bring together experts from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the causes and consequences of misinformation, and the ways in which social media platforms, traditional media outlets, and political elites interact in the misinformation ecosystem. We will also consider what interventions social media platforms could deploy to combat misinformation, as well as actions that can be taken by governments, traditional media outlets, and civil society organizations. 

• Dean Eckles –  Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management and Research Lead, MIT IDE
• Daphne Keller – Director of Platform Regulation at Stanford University
• Kartik Hosanagar – Director of AI for Business at Wharton

Algorithmic ranking and recommendation play a role in what we see on social media. Some commentators and policy-makers have argued for algorithmic transparency, whereby firms would be mandated to disclose information about these algorithms. One aim would be better assessing what they “amplify”. This panel will address our current knowledge about effects of social media algorithms, as well as promises and challenges in transparency and assessing amplification. 

Please enjoy a short break

• Sinan Aral – Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management and Director, MIT IDE
• Natalia Levina – Professor, New York University, Stern School of Business
• Richard Stengel – Political Analyst, CNBC
• Clint Watts – Distinguished Research Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute

The historical sophistication of Russian influence operations through social media is well known. But today, in Ukraine, they are struggling to keep up with the modern information war raging over social and traditional media. Today, the information war in Ukraine is more intense, more tightly contested and arguably more important than ever because motivating volunteer fighters at home and encouraging foreign support aboard are critical to success. And this time, it seems, Russia is losing. President Zelenskyy is deftly outmaneuvering Putin in this information war. And this time around, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google are proactively engaged in the information war. Information campaigns are difficult to quantify during the fog of war. But while it is hard to pinpoint the extent to which the information war is contributing to the overwhelming international unity against Vladimir Putin’ aggression, one thing is clear: social media, mainstream media and the narrative framing of the Ukrainian invasion will undoubtedly play an important role in how this conflict ends. Now, vigilance and fortitude are not only needed on the battlefield, where lives and territory will be won and lost, but also online, where the hearts and minds of the world will be won or lost. 

• Renée Richardson Gosline – Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management and MIT IDE
• Rumman Chowdhury – Director, ML Ethics, Twitter and Founder of Parity Responsible
• Chris Gilliard – Professor, Macomb Community College
• Suresh Venkatasubramanian – Assistant Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Professor, Brown University

The importance of algorithmic accountability ability and responsible AI has been raised by scholars, policy makers, and activists who recognize the disproportionate harm experienced by citizens who are not proximate to power. This panel will feature a discussion with practitioners, public policy experts, and scholars about ways that organizations can prioritize accountability and transparency, and how the “data is the new oil” attitude can foster surveillance and other harms. Cautionary tales and best practices will shed light on how we can work toward “human first” approaches to technology. 

• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

Sinan Aral a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur and venture capitalist. 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 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 Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. Sinan has helped leading Fortune 500 firms, including Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WeChat, Spotify, AirBnB, Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP and The New York Times to realize business value from big data analytics, social media and IT investments. 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 magazine and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline. 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 and a must-read for business leaders at every level of management. A managerial economist and econometrician by training, Sinan’s expertise spans social networks, causal inference, the design and analysis of large-scale digital experiments, machine learning, predictive modeling, natural language processing, AI, big data, marketing, IT, social commerce, ecommerce, behavior change and economic productivity. He earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She is a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, creating cutting-edge socio-technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. She is currently the Director of META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter, leading a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. Previously, she was CEO and founder of Parity, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company. She formerly served as Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems. Dr. Chowdhury co-authored a Harvard Business Review piece on it’s influences and impact. Dr. Chowdhury is dedicated to cultivating and growing the next wave of technology-forward companies enabling the responsible use of emerging technologies. She is a General Partner (and founder) of the Parity Responsible Innovation venture capital fund. She also serves as a mentor for the Creative Destruction Lab and as a board member of Startups and Society. Dr. Chowdhury is deeply engaged in AI global policy, serving as a board member of the UK Center for Data Ethics and Innovation, and on UNESCO’s Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. She has helped shape policy – as advisor to the UK House of Lords Parliamentary group on AI, in her testimony to the FTC, New York City Algorithmic Commission, the UN, OECD, Partnership on AI, and other global AI and ethics organizations. As service to the field and the larger community, she serves on the board of Oxford University’s Commission on AI and Governance, AI4All, a group dedicated to drawing underrepresented groups into STEM, the SSRC’s Just Tech Advisory Group, the University of Virginia’s Data Science Program, and Patterns, a data science journal by the publishers of Cell. Rumman has been featured in international media, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, NPR, MIT Sloan Magazine, MIT Technology Review, BBC, Axios, Cheddar TV, CRN, The Verge, Fast Company, Quartz, Corrierre Della Serra, Optio, Australian Broadcasting Channel and Nikkei Business Times. She is a member of BrainTrust, a community of experts for Protocol, a tech magazine by Politico. She was named one of BBC’s 100 Women, recognized as one of the Bay Area’s top 40 under 40, and honored to be inducted to the British Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). She has also been named by Forbes as one of Five Who are Shaping AI. Dr. Chowdhury holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master’s degree in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Renée DiResta is the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social and other media networks. Renee’s areas of research include disinformation and propaganda by state-sponsored actors, and health misinformation and conspiracy theories. Renee has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.

Renée regularly writes and speaks about the role that tech platforms and curatorial algorithms play in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. She is an Ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist, Journal of Commerce, and more. She is a 2019 Truman National Security Project security fellow, a 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member. Renée is a co-author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand, published by O’Reilly Media.

Dean Eckles is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan.

His substantive research examines people’s interactions with and through communication technologies, especially how these technologies mediate, amplify, and direct social influence. This work sometimes requires or benefits from new analytical methods, so Eckles also works on applied statistics, design of field experiments, and causal inference.

Prior to joining MIT, he was a scientist at Facebook, where he worked on many product areas and analytical methods, including News Feed, messaging, advertising, tools for randomized experiments, and survey methods. Eckles previously worked in research at Nokia and Yahoo.

Eckles received his BA in philosophy, a BS and MS in cognitive science,  an MS in statistics, and a PhD in communication, all from Stanford University.

Dr. Chris Gilliard holds a PhD from Purdue University’s Rhetoric and Composition Program and currently teaches at Macomb Community College. His early work focused on the ways that narratives about black athletes constructed blackness along a narrow and limiting spectrum. He’s shifted that focus a bit, and for the last several years his scholarship has concentrated on privacy, institutional tech policy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these apply to college students. He is currently developing a project that looks at how popular misunderstandings of mathematical concepts create the illusions of fairness and objectivity in student analytics, predictive policing, and hiring practices.

Renée Richardson Gosline is a Senior Lecturer in the Management Science group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the head of the new Human-AI Interaction group at MIT’s Initiative on The Digital Economy. She is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology, and the implications of AI for cognitive bias in human decision-making. In 2020 Dr. Gosline was named a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. and an honoree on the Thinkers50 Radar List of thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe.” She has also been named one of the World’s Top 40 Professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. She is a leading thinker on the science of digital brand strategy and CX, and has been published in academic journal and books, and has contributed her expertise to international media outlets PBS, The BBC, The Economist, NPR, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, and Psychology Today.

Dr. Gosline’s research examines how digital structure and technology affect human judgment and performance (as featured in her Tedx talk, “The Outsourced Mind”). Her projects have examined: how cognitive style predicts preference for AI versus human input; the interaction of digital brand status and placebo effects in performance; how consumers determine “real” from “fake” products; the circumstances under which customers perceive value in platforms; and the effects of storytelling in social media on trust and persuasion. She is currently conducting experiments on how the presence of AI affects the judgment of human decisions, and the interplay of human and AI bias, Gosline is also currently writing a book called “The Human Algorithm” (MIT Press), which examines how AI affects our lives, and the benefits and perils of our digitally-mediated judgments.

Dr. Gosline enjoys teaching MBA and Executive Education classes on CX (Customer Experience), Brand strategy, and Experimental Culture. She has also collaborated and consulted with a variety of organizations on CX and Leadership, including Salesforce, IBM, Procter and Gamble, OECD, Johnson & Johnson, Analog Devices Incorporated, TD Ameritrade, and Capgemini. Prior to academia, she was a marketing practitioner at LVMH Moet Hennessy and Leo Burnett.

Dr. Gosline serves on the advisory board of the National Kidney Foundation and the Scientific Affiliate Board of the Behavioral Economics group Ideas42. She received her Undergraduate, Master’s, and Doctoral degrees at Harvard University.

Born in Iowa City, Iowa, Frances is the daughter of two professors and grew up attending the Iowa caucuses with her parents, instilling a strong sense of pride in democracy and responsibility for civic participation.

Frances holds a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College and a MBA from Harvard. She is a specialist in algorithmic product management, having worked on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, Yelp and Facebook. She was recruited to Facebook to be the lead Product Manager on the Civic Misinformation team, which dealt with issues related to democracy and misinformation, and later also worked on counter-espionage.

During her time at Facebook, Frances became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety  and putting people’s lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous decision to blow the whistle on Facebook.

Frances fundamentally believes that the problems we are facing today with social media are solvable. We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity.

Kartik Hosanagar is the John C. Hower Professor of Technology and Digital Business and a Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Kartik’s research work focuses on the digital economy, in particular the impact of analytics and algorithms on consumers and society, Internet media, Internet marketing and e-commerce.

Kartik has been recognized as one of the world’s top 40 business professors under 40. He is a ten-time recipient of MBA or Undergraduate teaching excellence awards at the Wharton School. His research has received several best paper awards. Kartik cofounded and developed the core IP for Yodle Inc, a venture-backed firm that was acquired by Web.com. Yodle was listed by Inc. Magazine among America’s fastest growing private companies. He is a cofounder of SmartyPal Inc. He has served on the advisory boards of Milo (acq. by eBay) and Monetate and is involved with many other startups as either an investor or board member. His past consulting and executive education clients include Google, American Express, Citi and others. Kartik was a co-host of the SiriusXM show The Digital Hour. He currently serves as a department editor at the journal Management Science and has previously served as a Senior Editor at the journals Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly.

Kartik graduated at the top of his class with a Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering and a Masters in Information Systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS, Pilani), India, and he has an MPhil in Management Science and a PhD in Management Science and Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University.

Outside of Wharton, he likes to make short films, start companies, and spend time with his kids.

Kartik’s Twitter Page

Daphne Keller’s work focuses on platform regulation and Internet users’ rights. She has testified before legislatures, courts, and regulatory bodies around the world, and published both academically and in popular press on topics including platform content moderation practices, constitutional and human rights law, copyright, data protection, and national courts’ global takedown orders. Her recent work focuses on legal protections for users’ free expression rights when state and private power intersect, particularly through platforms’ enforcement of Terms of Service or use of algorithmic ranking and recommendations. Until 2020, Daphne was the Director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. She also served until 2015 as Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had primary responsibility for the company’s search products. Daphne has taught Internet law at Stanford, Berkeley, and Duke law schools. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, Brown University, and Head Start.

Prof. Levina is an innovative teacher who has developed a unique course on “Digital Innovation & Crowdsourcing,” which has been receiving stellar evaluations in undergraduate, MBA, and Executive MBA programs.   She has been nominated for the Best Professor Award by NYU Stern’s MBA students. She is a frequent speaker on these topics in academic and industry conferences.

Her research has been published in top journals such as Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science,  Academy of Management Journal, Decision Sciences Journal, and Harvard Business Review, among others. She has received the Best Published Paper of 2015 Award in the field of Information Systems, Best Published Paper of 2015 Award from Information & Organization journal, Best Published Paper of 2015 award from Academy of Management Research Methods Division, Best Published Paper of 2014 award from the Academy of Management OCIS Division, numerous best conference paper awards, and two Ph.D. dissertation awards.  Prof. Levina has previously served as a Senior Editor at Information Systems Research, as a board member of Organization Science journal,  and is currently an editorial board member of Information & Organizations. She has served as a program co-chair for the 2016 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and the conference chair for Collective Intelligence Conference (2016).  She has chaired AIS Special Interest Group (SIG) on Grounded Theory Method from 2016-2020.   Prof. Levina was awarded numerous research grants including Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Fellowship, IBM Shared University  Research Award, and National Science Foundation VOSS Research Grant.  She was a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge (UK), the U. of Hawaii,  and the University of California Santa Barbara. She has an ongoing appointment as a Research Environment Professor at the Warwick Business School at the U. of Warwick (UK).

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team.

Bridging the fields of cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, David’s research combines behavioral experiments run online and in the field with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs, and choices. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making. He focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and “fake news,” understanding political psychology and polarization, and promoting human cooperation. David received his B.A. in Computational Biology from Cornell University in 2004 and his Ph.D. in Systems Biology from Harvard University in 2009, was a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology from 2009 to 2013, and was an Assistant and then Associate Professor (with tenure) of Psychology, Economics, and Management at Yale University prior to joining the faculty at MIT. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Economic Review, Psychological Science, Management Science, New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Political Science, and has received widespread attention from print, radio, TV and social media outlets. He has also written popular press articles for outlets including the New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, and the Psychological Observer. He was named to Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world,” chosen as a 2012 Pop!Tech Science Fellow, and awarded the 2015 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research, fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, and the 2020 FABBS Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Papers he has coauthored have been awarded Best Paper of the Year in Experimental Economics, Social Cognition, and Political Methodology.

Becca Rausch is the Massachusetts State Senator representing the Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex District. She is the third woman, the second Democrat, and the first Jewish person to hold her seat. Senator Rausch was elected in November 2018 and sworn into office on January 2, 2019. Prior to her election to the Legislature, Senator Rausch worked for over a decade as a practicing attorney.

Her work spanned both the private and public sectors, including several years at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services, where she earned a Citation for Outstanding Performance. Senator Rausch is also a former elected local legislator, union steward, and law professor. Her areas of expertise include health law and policy, information governance and knowledge management, and data privacy and security.

The granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and a published author on reproductive health and justice and body size and the law, Senator Rausch is a lifelong advocate for social justice, fairness, and equality for all. She holds degrees from Brandeis University (B.A.), Northeastern University School of Law (J.D.), and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (LL.M.).

Senator Rausch lives in Needham with her husband, their two young children, and their dog (a big, floppy Goldendoodle).

Richard Stengel is the longest serving Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in American history (2013-16). While at the State Department, he helped modernize State’s communications and led the department’s counter-disinformation efforts. He helped create and oversee the Global Engagement Center, the United States’ only stand-alone anti-ISIL messaging entity. He spearheaded the creation of the Sawab Center in Abu Dhabi, the first joint American and foreign counter ISIL messaging hub, which has become a template for others around the world.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian is a Professor (Research) of Computer Science and Data Science at Brown University. Suresh’s background is in algorithms and computational geometry, as well as data mining and machine learning. His current research interests lie in algorithmic fairness, and more generally the impact of automated decision-making systems in society. Prior to Brown University, Suresh was at the University of Utah, where as an assistant professor he was the John and Marva Warnock Assistant Professor and received a CAREER award from the NSF for his work in the geometry of probability. He has received a test-of-time award at ICDE 2017 for his work in privacy. His research on algorithmic fairness has received press coverage across North America and Europe, including NPR’s Science Friday, NBC, and CNN, as well as in other media outlets. He is a past member of the Computing Community Consortium Council of the CRA, spent 4 years (2017-2021) as a member of the board of the ACLU in Utah, and is a past member of New York City’s Failure to Appear Tool (FTA) Research Advisory Council, the Research Advisory Council for the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania and the Utah State Auditor’s Commission on protecting privacy and preventing discrimination.

He is currently on deputation in the Biden Administration, serving as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Clint Watts is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and

Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. Watts recently examined the rise of social media’s influence in his first book, Messing with The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News.

Watts’ research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, the influence of social media, and Russian disinformation. His tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. From that year until 2016, he worked with a team to track and model the rise of Russian influence operations via social media leading up to the U.S. Presidential election. This research led him to testify before four different Senate committees in 2017 and 2018 regarding Russia’s information warfare campaign against the U.S. and the West. Today, Clint leads a team called Miburo that detects, disrupts and counters extremism and malign influence around the world.

Watts has served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, an FBI Special Agent, the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), a consultant to the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division (CTD) and National Security Branch (NSB), and an analyst supporting the U.S. intelligence community. His writing has appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War on The Rocks, and the Huffington Post.

Duncan Watts is a computational social scientist interested in social and organizational networks, collective dynamics of human systems, web-based experiments, and analysis of large-scale digital data, including the production, consumption, and absorption of news.

Duncan Watts is the Stevens University Professor and twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his appointment at the Annenberg School, he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Department of Operations, Information and Decisions in the Wharton School, where he is the inaugural Rowan Fellow.

Before coming to Penn, Watts was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. He was also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Prior to joining MSR in 2012, he was a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group.

His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology and Harvard Business Review, and has been recognized by the 2009 German Physical Society Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics, the 2013 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for Complexity Science, and the 2014 Everett M. Rogers Award. He was named an inaugural fellow of the Network Science Society in 2018 and a Carnegie Fellow in 2020.

Watts is the author of three books: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton 2003), Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press 1999), and Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer (Crown Business 2011).

He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Australian Defence Force Academy, from which he also received his officer’s commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University.