Education
Pentland received his bachelors from the University of Michigan and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.
Pentland received his bachelors from the University of Michigan and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.
He is one of the most cited authors in computer science, and helped create the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory 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 Laboratory Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health
He directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Human Dynamics Laboratory which uses big data to better understand human society, the Institute for Data Driven Design which builds tools to protect individual privacy, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory 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-People’s Alliance, a joint project on big data and human development co-created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the Overseas Development Institute.
He started as lecturer at Stanford University in both computer science and psychology, and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in 1986, where he became Academic Head of the Media Laboratory and received the Toshiba Chair in Media Arts and Sciences. In 2011 Forbes named him one of the world"s seven most powerful data scientists along with a founder of Google and the Chief Technology Officer of the United States.