Potentially competing interests
Dean Eckles is currently an employee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
D.E. was until recently a consultant to Twitter.
D.E. was previously a contractor of Microsoft, as a visiting researcher to Microsoft Research New England.
D.E. was previously an employee and contractor of Facebook, and until recently had a significant financial interest (SFI) in Facebook.
D.E. was a consultant to and has a SFI in GoFundMe.
D.E. has SFIs in Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.
D.E. was previously an employee of Nokia and Yahoo.
D.E. receives some scholarly funding via a professorship endowed by Mitsubishi. Previously, D.E. received (from 2017 to 2020) some scholarly funding via a professorship endowed in 1983 by Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. (KDD), which is now part of KDDI Corporation.
Some of D.E.’s research is or has been funded by Amazon, Boston Globe Media, Facebook, IBM, the US Air Force (via a subcontract from Lincoln Laboratory), and The World Bank, and his work as a graduate student was previously supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Nokia.
D.E. is an inventor on patents assigned to Stanford University and Facebook.
D.E.’s travel to or lodging at conferences has been supported by universities and various additional funders, including Microsoft, Vail Resorts, Marketing Science Institute, Technology Crossover Ventures, Facebook, Center for Open Science, DARPA, and NSF.
D.E. has been an organizer of the Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE@MIT), during which period it has been sponsored by Amazon, Booking.com, Facebook, and Netflix.
D.E. sometimes conducts research via both data use agreements with unnamed firms (e.g., retailers, Internet companies, and fitness companies) and by advising research by collaborators, often students, who are employees or consultants of other firms (e.g., Facebook, Stitch Fix, Microsoft).
The disclosures here are intended to be consistent with the definitions (e.g., of SFI) in MIT’s policies.