Alex "Sandy" Pentland

Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Toshiba Professor Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program Director Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland directs MIT Connection Science, an MIT-wide initiative, and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the "7 most powerful data scientists in the world" along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States. He is on the Board of the UN Foundations' Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy. He is a member of advisory boards for the UN Secretary General and the UN Foundation, and the American Bar Association, and previously for Google, AT&T, and Nissan. He is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance . He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum. Over the years Sandy has advised more than 70 PhD students. Almost half are now tenured faculty at leading institutions, with another one-quarter leading industry research groups and a final quarter founders of their own companies. Together Sandy and his students have pioneered computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His most recent books are Social Physics, published by Penguin Press, and Honest Signals, published by MIT Press. Interesting experiences include dining with British Royalty and the President of India, staging fashion shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and developing a method for counting beavers from space. Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland Connection Science Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program Social Physics Science Medium: Searching for Someone Edge.org: Reinventing Society with Big Data American Scientist To Signal Is Human Scientific American: Wearable Intelligence Nature: Secret Signals Science: Computational Social ScienceCollective IntelligenceTime Critical Social Mobilization Harvard Business Review: Breakthrough Ideas World Economic Forum: The New Deal on DataPersonal Data: A New Asset Class Technology Review: Reality Mining Robert Wood Johnson: Reality Mining for Health Business and Engineering Communications of the ACM: Beyond Viral The Verge: Godfather of Wearables Forbes: Mining Human Behavior Newsweek: A Trillion Points of Data New York Times: Understanding Conversations Strategy+Business: Honest Signals Entrepreneurship Financial Times: Twitter Effect The New York Times: Top Ten Internet Of Things Product BusinessWeek: World’s Most Intriguing Startups ABC: Listening For Depression Financial Times: Entrepreneurship For Development Recent Awards Brandeis Privacy Award Best Business Book, Innovation McKinsey Award Harvard Business Review 10 Technologies That Will Change The World World’s Most Powerful Data Scientists 40th Anniversary of the Internet Grand Challenge 10 Technologies That Will Change The World Future Health Technology Award Carlos Ghosn Award for Automotive Design Videos Beyond Viral Sustainable Digital Ecologies (Davos) Breakthrough Idea of the Year talk at Davos Honest Signals Reality Mining Ooh La La Curriculum Vitae Research Papers Older Papers