Twitter Hires Castleberry Singleton as New VP of Inclusion and Diversity

In line with its goal of having six percent or more under-represented minorities in leadership roles, Twitter has hired Castleberry Singleton to lead its diversity efforts.

"Excited to announce I'm joining @Twitter as the new VP of Inclusion and Diversity. Can't wait to help build on the company's great progress!" Singleton said in a tweet on Wednesday.

She previously founded the Dignity and Respect Campaign, and formerly led diversity and inclusion efforts at Motorola, TechCrunch reported.

The micro-blogging site was making some progress around the hiring of under-represented minorities, according to its latest diversity report.

Overall, Twitter is 57 percent White, 32 percent Asian, three percent Black, four percent Hispanic/ Latin, three percent multi-racial, less than one percent American Indian and Native Hawaiian in the US and 37 percent female worldwide, up from 34 percent in 2015, the TechCrunch report said.

Separately, a recent study showed that Twitter can track and detect major disruptive events faster than the police.

The study showed that computer systems using a series of machine-learning algorithms could automatically scan through tweets and detect serious incidents, such as breaking into a shop or setting cars alight, before they were reported to the police.

The computer system could also discern information about where the riots were rumoured to take place and where groups of youths were gathering.

On average the computer systems could pick up on the disruptive events several minutes before officials could. In some cases even over an hour ahead of the security personnel, the researchers said in the paper published in the journal ACM Transactions on Internet Technology.