Professor Sandy Pentland

If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. We can now predict and change the social structures of companies, governments, communities and much more, to solve some of our most difficult issues. Social physics is about idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors. It will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work—and can be made to work better, at every level of society. In his newest book, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science, Pentland leads you to the edge of the most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a generation, an entirely new way to look at life itself.

Professor Pentland is revered as a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. Pentland's research focus is on harnessing information flows and incentives within social networks, the big data revolution and converting this technology into real-world ventures. His work provides organizations with better management tools and better ways to interact with their customers. Pentland is the World Economic Forum’s lead academic for its big data and personal data initiatives. His book, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World was published in 2008 by the MIT Press.

Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and is a founding member of the Advisory Boards for Nissan, Motorola Mobility, Telefonica, and a variety of start-up firms. In 2011, he was chosen as one of the world's top data scientists by Tim O'Reilly in Forbes magazine and in 2012, Forbes named him one of the ‘seven most powerful data scientists in the world.’ In 2013, he won the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review. He is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world and a pioneer in computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (GoogleGlass), image understanding and modern biometrics. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features on BBC World, Discover and Science channels.

Pentland’s research group and entrepreneurship program have spun off more than 30 companies to date, three of which are publicly listed and several that serve millions of poor in Africa and South Asia. Audiences have the opportunity to learn from one of the world’s leading data scientists about the new science of idea flow. Through passionate speeches, he offers revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence.