Faculty Forum Online: Big Data’s Brave New World, Oct. 2, 2013

Update: View a video of this presentation.

The explosion of mobile technologies makes it possible to acquire vast amounts of data about individual behavior and social interactions. The challenge now is to learn how to analyze this Big Data and apply these new understandings to politics, markets, and society.

In the first Faculty Forum Online broadcast of the 2013-14 season, Alex (Sandy) Pentland PhD ’82, MIT’s Toshiba professor of media arts and sciences, will discuss these challenges as well as the ongoing development of human-centered technology. Following his comments, he will take questions from the worldwide MIT community. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2013, from noon to 12:30 p.m. (EDT).

Register for this free event— Big Data’s Brave New World—to receive the link for live viewing. After the event, return to Slice of MIT and continue the conversation in the comments.

ABOUT SANDY PENTLAND PhD ’82 Sandy Pentland’s research focuses on entrepreneurship, computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. In 2012, Forbes named Pentland one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world and his research has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Nature, and Science.

Pentland is the director of the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives, and helped develop the MIT Media Lab. He is a founding member of the Advisory Boards for Nissan, Motorola Mobility, and Telefonica.

Pentland's research group and entrepreneurship program have spun off more than 30 companies, including three which are publicly listed. Pentland joined the MIT faculty in 1986 and has also served as a lecturer at Stanford University.

His research, which attempts to provide people with a clearer picture of their social environment, was chosen as a 2009 Breakthrough Idea of the Year by Harvard Business Review and was named one of the 2008 Top Ten Emerging Technologies by MIT Technology Review. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1976 and his doctorate from MIT in 1982.

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