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 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 one of the UN Secretary General’s  “Data Revolutionaries” helping to forge 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.   Recent invited keynotes include annual meetings of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, G20, World Bank, and JP Morgan.

He is a member of advisory boards for the UN Secretary-General, the UN Foundation, Consumers Union, and OECD, and formerly the American Bar Association, Google, AT&T, and Nissan. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a council member within the World Economic Forum.

* Interesting experiences include dining with the 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.

His books:

2021 – Building the New Economy: Data as Capital
2017 – Swarms and Network Intelligence in Search
2014 – Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread ̶ The Lessons from a New Science
2008 – Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World

Photo credit: nextcanada.com