High-profile social media expert Sinan Aral will discuss his latest research findings at UD's sixth annual Gore Lecture on April 28.

April 28: Gore lecture

Sinan Aral to discuss the power of social media at UD talk

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11:55 a.m., April 7, 2016--“When you ‘like’ a product, what does that do to the level of consumer demand for that product?” asked Sinan Aral during a talk at TedxNYU

Aral, a leading social media expert, conducts research exploring the growing role of websites like Twitter and Facebook in culture, business and more. He calls this powerful influence “social commerce.”

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“And it’s not just about commerce,” he continued. “For instance, how do revolutions happen that are encouraged or propagated through messages sent on social media?”

“This is one channel through which we can achieve great social change that we couldn’t have achieved just a few years ago.”

Aral, a frequent speaker at high-profile events like Data Gotham, TEDxSiliconValley, TEDxColumbia Engineering, TEDxNYU, ADSCon and PopTech, will discuss some of his latest research findings during a talk at the University of Delaware this month.

On Thursday, April 28, UD’s sixth annual W.L. Gore Lecture Series in Management Science will feature Aral, who serves as the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he holds a joint appointment in the IT and marketing groups and co-leads the Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Aral has worked closely with Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, The New York Times, IBM, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, SAP and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on social media and information technology investments, and was named one of Poets and Quants’ Best 40 Under 40 exceptional business school professors under 40 years of age. 

Aral's research focuses on social contagion, measuring and managing how information diffusion in social networks affects information worker productivity, consumer demand and viral marketing. 

This research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award and multiple best paper awards.

Aral also uses social media as a tool himself, regularly posting on Twitter to more than 24,000 followers about his research and the latest developments in social media.

Aral has been a Fulbright Scholar and served as chief scientist and on the board of directors of SocialAmp, as well as chief scientist at Humin. 

He is also the scholar-in-residence at The New York Times Research and Development Lab, and an organizer of the Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN) and the Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE).

His work is often featured in mainstream media outlets such as The Economist, The New York Times, Businessweek, Wired, Fast Company and CIO Magazine.

The Gore Lecture will take place at 5 p.m. in Multipurpose Room C of the Trabant University Center. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Register to attend the Gore Lecture.

About the Gore Lecture

The W.L. Gore Lecture Series in Management Science, presented by UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, is sponsored by an endowment from the Gore family. 

This lecture series features experts in the application of probability, statistics and experimental design to decision-making, including applications in academia, business, government, engineering and medicine.

The series recognizes the key role that the fields of probability, statistics, and experimental design have played in the success of W.L. Gore and Associates Inc.

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