Introduction
Data, AI, and social media echo chambers can feel scary, but if harnessed correctly they can dramatically improve our quality of life. The potential for improvement comes first from better scientific understanding of our human minds and bodies, and second from a more open and shared understanding of society, government, and our day-to-day lives.
The key to achieving these positive results is aggressive pursuit of a new, broad science of human life to unify the traditional and narrow sciences, and making data a trusted and safe resource for everyone. We are building such systems today, and are changing "business as usual" for governments around the world, as well as beginning to unify fragmented social and computational sciences.
About the event
Biography
Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited scientists in the world, and Forbes recently 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 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.
He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Data Transparency Lab, the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance and the Institute for Data Driven Design. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum.
Over the years Sandy has advised more than 60 PhD students. Almost half are now tenured faculty at leading institutions, with another one-quarter leading industry research groups and a final quarter founders of their own companies.
Together Sandy and his students have pioneered computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His most recent books are `Social Physics,' published by Penguin Press, and 'Honest Signals', published by MIT Press.
Interesting experiences include dining with 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.