Alex (Sandy) Pentland

Alex "Sandy" Pentland
Alex Pentland
Born	1952 (age 64–65) Ann Arbor, MI
Residence	Boston, MA
Citizenship	USA
Institutions	Stanford University, MIT
Alma mater	MIT University of Michigan
Thesis	Visual Inference of Shape: Computation from Local Features (1982)
Doctoral advisor	Whitman Richards
Doctoral students	Irfan Essa Rosalind Picard
Known for	Social Physics, Wearable Computing, Computational Social Science, Computer Vision

Alex Paul "Sandy" Pentland (born 1952) is an American computer scientist, the Toshiba Professor at MIT, and serial entrepreneur. He is one of the most cited authors in computer science, and helped create the MIT Media Lab.

Pentland received his bachelors from the University of Michigan and obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 co-leads both the Big Data and the Personal Data and Privacy initiatives of the World Economic Forum, serves on the boards of Telefónica, Motorola Mobility, and Nissan Motors, and 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 Human Dynamics Lab which uses big data to better understand human society, the Institute for Data Driven Design which builds tools to protect individual privacy, and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program which creates ventures to take cutting edge technologies into the real world, with a special focus on promoting entrepreneurship in developing nations. 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.

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