Twitter and researchers from UC Berkeley have collaborated to launch a new research initiative focused on the societal impact of machine learning. The initiative aims to provide insight into how social systems, such as social media platforms, can benefit from an improved relationship with machine learning and AI.

Twitter has stated that this partnership is one of many steps the company will be taking to become more involved with machine learning, including sponsoring the upcoming ACM FAT* Conference. Twitter wants to make its use of machine learning more “fair, accountable and transparent” to members, considering machine learning already runs many of its daily operations, including onboarding and preparing user timelines.

The initiative will be led by UC Berkeley professors Moritz Hardt and Ben Recht and includes both a UC Berkeley team and a corresponding Twitter team. Twitter plans to integrate its data and real-word insights with UC Berkeley’s fundamental and applied research components to create more useful algorithms and machine learning models.

“By bringing together the academic expertise of UC Berkeley with our industry perspective, we are looking to do fundamental work in this nascent space and apply it to improve Twitter,” stated Twitter.