Bluefin Labs was founded by Deb Roy and Michael Fleischman in 2008.

The seed for the company originated within the MIT Media Lab’s Human Speechome Project (HSP).
Headed by Roy, head of the Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines group, the goal of HSP was to understand language acquisition by making a complete digital record of the first years of a child’s home life and analyzing that record computationally.
Roy and his wife installed video equipment throughout their home and captured much of their son’s life from birth to age three - a total of 240,000 hours of audio and video.
Buried in this massive corpus lay insights into how their son learned language at a level of detail never before captured.
To sift through the data, Roy and his MIT team developed numerous deep machine learning algorithms designed to uncover the context and patterns within the audio and video data.
Their results are explained in Deb Roy's TEDTalk 'The birth of a word.'

As a student in Roy’s MIT group, Fleischman adapted the concepts of data driven designed for language acquisition and applied them to another massive video data set: broadcast video.
Fleischman’s PhD work garnered the attention of the National Science Foundation which awarded Roy and Fleischman a Small Business Innovation Research grant and effectively bootstrapped the launch of Bluefin.

Just as HSP created algorithms that can “ground” the meaning of a word within a larger context, Bluefin is using deep machine learning to ground the meaning of a given comment pulled out from a social media stream.
 By looking at the context of words expressed by individuals, Bluefin can use the meaning of these words to connect comments back to the events, people, places, products, and brands that caused those words to be expressed in the first place.

On July 32, 2012, Bluefin Labs announced that advertising industry veteran JP Maheu will join the company as CEO.

On February 6, 2013, Twitter announced that it was buying Bluefin Labs for approximately $100 million.
Bluefin Labs was founded by Deb Roy and Michael Fleischman in 2008.
The seed for the company originated within the MIT Media Lab’s Human Speechome Project (HSP). Headed by Roy, head of the Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines group, the goal of HSP was to understand language acquisition by making a complete digital record of the first years of a child’s home life and analyzing that record computationally. Roy and his wife installed video equipment throughout their home and captured much of their son’s life from birth to age three - a total of 240,000 hours of audio and video. Buried in this massive corpus lay insights into how their son learned language at a level of detail never before captured. To sift through the data, Roy and his MIT team developed numerous deep machine learning algorithms designed to uncover the context and patterns within the audio and video data. Their results are explained in Deb Roy's TEDTalk 'The birth of a word.'
As a student in Roy’s MIT group, Fleischman adapted the concepts of data driven designed for language acquisition and applied them to another massive video data set: broadcast video. Fleischman’s PhD work garnered the attention of the National Science Foundation which awarded Roy and Fleischman a Small Business Innovation Research grant and effectively bootstrapped the launch of Bluefin.
Just as HSP created algorithms that can “ground” the meaning of a word within a larger context, Bluefin is using deep machine learning to ground the meaning of a given comment pulled out from a social media stream.  By looking at the context of words expressed by individuals, Bluefin can use the meaning of these words to connect comments back to the events, people, places, products, and brands that caused those words to be expressed in the first place.
On July 32, 2012, Bluefin Labs announced that advertising industry veteran JP Maheu will join the company as CEO.
On February 6, 2013, Twitter announced that it was buying Bluefin Labs for approximately $100 million.
Bluefin Labs