People to Watch 2016

Alex Pentland
Professor and Director of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alex Pentland Image

Alex “Sandy” Pentland is currently a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab, which uses big data to better understand human society. Alex is at the forefront in figuring out how human-generated data “exhaust” can be put to use in a way that’s beneficial to humanity—not just to boost corporate efficiency and profitably. He was named by Forbes as one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world and is a powerful force for data transparency. Alex is a serial entrepreneur and has co-founded more than a dozen companies, and sits on advisory boards of many more. Before joining MIT in 1986, he was a lecturer at Stanford University in the Computer Science and Psychology departments. Alex received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT.


P. Taylor Goetz Apache Software	Jeff Hammerbacher Cloudera	Jay Kreps Confluent

Todd Lipcon Cloudera	Jacques Nadeau Dremio	Peter Norvig Google

Alex Pentland MIT	Jennifer Priestley Kennesaw State University	Nate Silver FiveThirtyEight

Daniel Sturman Cloudera	Werner Vogels Amazon	Matei Zaharia Databricks