Alex Pentland, PhD
Director, MIT Connection Science
Herman Beerman Lecture
Understanding People
BIO
Alex Pentland, PhD has been selected to the be the 2019 Herman Beerman Lecture recipient. Dr. Pentland received his bachelors degree from the University of Michigan and later obtained his PhD in Psychology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982.
He started as lecturer at Stanford University in both computer science and psychology, and joined the MIT faculty in 1986, where he became Academic Head of the Media Laboratory and received the Toshiba Chair in Media Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Boards of the UN Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the American Bar Association, AT&T, and several of the startup companies he has co-founded. He previously co-founded and co-directed the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health.
He directs the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Lab and MIT Connection Science Program which explore the use of big data and AI to better understand human society, and the Trust Data Alliance which is an alliance of companies and nations building open-source software that makes AI and big data safe, trusted and secure. He also manages the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program which creates ventures to take cutting edge technologies into the real world. He also serves as Academic Director of Data-Pop Alliance, a joint project on big data and human development co-created by the MIT Media Lab, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the Overseas Development Institute.
In 2011 Forbes named him one of the world’s seven most powerful data scientists along with a founder of Google and the CTO of the United States. His most recent books are `Social Physics,’ published by Penguin Press, and ‘Honest Signals‘, published by MIT Press. The SID looks forward to welcoming Dr. Pentland to the 2019 SID Annual Meeting.