Twitter Has Appointed an Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Alumnus Parag Agarwal as the Chief Technology Officer

Microblogging platform Twitter has appointed Parag Agrawal, an IIT Bombay alumnus, as the new CTO (Chief Technology Officer), according to an update on the company's website a few hours back.

Parag, a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, succeeds Adam Messinger, who had left the organisation in late 2016. The appointment of Parag was announced internally in October 2017.

Role and Responsibilities
In the role of CTO, Parag is leading technical strategy for the company. He is focused on scaling a cohesive machine learning as well as artificial intelligence across Twitter’s consumer plus revenue products and infrastructure teams, as per information available on the company’s website. Twitter also announced this week that it intends to hire a Director of Social Science in an attempt to increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation on its platform.

Background
Parag Agarwal had joined Twitter in 2011 as an Ads Engineer and has since then led efforts on scaling Ads systems, as well as creating and deploying a platform for online machine learning. Before his current posting, he held the title of Distinguished Software Engineer.

Prior to joining Twitter, he did research in large-scale data management with collaborators at Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, and AT&T Labs.

Improve Health Metrics of Online Content

Artificial Intelligence helps Twitter in preventing abuse on the social network. Recently, amid increasing trolls and abuse on social media, Twitter issued a proposal seeking suggestions from its users on improving the health of content posted online.
In a proposal issued to improve health metrics, Twitter said it aims to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation across the globe, and to hold itself publicly accountable towards progress.

In a recent company blog post, Twitter mentioned that by measuring their contribution to the overall health of the public conversation, they believe they can more holistically approach and measure their impact on the world for years to come. Twitter's health will be built and measured by how they help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking; conversely, abuse, spam and manipulation will detract from it. They are looking forward to partner with outside experts to help them identify how they measure the health of Twitter, keep themselves accountable to share Twitter’s progress with the world and establish a way forward for the long-term.