Alex Pentland

In 2011 Tim O’Reilly named him one of the world's seven most powerful data scientists along with Larry Page, then CEO of Google and the CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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, and later joined the faculty of the MIT School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School. 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. Pentland is one of the most cited authors in computer science with an h-index of 134, co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Pentland received his bachelors from the University of Michigan and obtained his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.

Alex Paul "Sandy" Pentland (born 1951) is an American computer scientist, the Toshiba Professor at MIT, and serial entrepreneur.