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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
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