If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland.
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Alex “Sandy” Pentland
MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program & Human Dynamics Laboratory
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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 Alex “Sandy” Pentland holds a triple appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Media Lab (SA+P), School of Engineering and School of Management. He also directs MIT’s Connection Science initiative, the Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and has been a member of the Advisory Boards for Google, Nissan, Telefonica, Tencent, and a variety of start-up firms. For several years he co-led the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives. He has pioneered the fields of wearable computing and computational social science, generating several successful startups and technology spinoffs. Sandy was recently named by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. Sandy has previously helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health. In 2012 Forbes named Sandy one of the “seven most powerful data scientists in the world”, along with the founders of Google and the CTO of the United States, and in 2013 he won the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review. Prof. Pentland’s books include Honest Signals and Social Physics. He was named to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014. Sandy holds a BGS from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from MIT.
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.
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Topics
Topics
Maintaining Vital Workplace Collaboration & Communication in a Work-From-Home World
Frontiers of Financial Technology
Trust::Data
Videos
Videos
Networked Data: Sandy Pentland at TEDxCambridge 2011
Success through social physics | Alex 'Sandy' Pentland | TEDxBeaconStreet
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