Doug Beeferman

Doug Beeferman is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where he has been employed since June 2017. His work primarily focuses on natural language processing (NLP) and computational social science. He engages in a combination of software engineering and research, developing tools for media data acquisition and analysis, particularly in the context of social media and online news. His research interests include conversation analysis, topic modeling, fairness in automatic speech recognition, and the study of polarization and misinformation on social media platforms.13

Prior to his role at MIT, Beeferman worked as a software engineer at various organizations, including Google and Lycos, where he contributed to projects related to search engines and query analysis. He has also founded Datamuse, a venture focused on creating reference and brainstorming tools.12

Beeferman holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering/Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. His academic contributions include numerous publications in the fields of NLP and machine learning, with a significant focus on the analysis of search query logs and social media data.24