Past Member

Sohan Dsouza

Former Research Assistant
  • Viral Communications

Sohan Dsouza is working on ways to solve information and mobilization problems using a combination of technology and social science. His research interests include crowdsourcing, veracity, virality, knowledge management, AI and Society, and social mobilization. He is interested in the intersection between disinformation and political polarization, and its implications for policy on social media platforms.

His work has been published in Nature, PNAS, Transport, and IEEE intelligent Systems, and has been covered by major media outlets including the New York Times, BBC, NPR, Guardian, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Associated Press.

He has experience in industry, as a software engineer and operations analyst; and in academia as a research engineer and, at MIT, as a research assistant. His education spans Computer Information Systems (BS), Informatics (MS), IT Management (MBA/PGDM), and, at MIT, Media Arts and Sciences (MS). His MIT Master's thesis is titled "Crowdsourcing Moral Psychology".

Inside the Moral Machine, co-authored with Edmond Awad, is a creators' account of the Moral Machine project from inception to publication, published at Nature Behavioral and Social Sciences blogs. Click here to read it.

Sohan also built a visualization tool to explore results from the analysis of the data. Click here to interact with it.

In the winning team of the 2012 US State Department Tag Challenge (read coverage here), using social mobilization and degree-proportioned recruitment incentive mechanisms (similar to the Red Balloon Challenge) to locate the highest number of moving targets across geographical zones within the time limit.