Alex Pentland: Building a New Economy

During the last 30 years digital data and the AI to exploit that data has emerged as a new primary means of production, analogous to money, labor, or land. At the same time the development of digital networks and big computing centers has promoted centralization of data and digital systems, leaving individuals and communities outside of this new digital economy, and without understanding or control of their finance, health, or governance. New distributed tools, federated AI, blockchain, etc., a group of technologies loosely described as Web 3.0, have the potential to reverse this trend and give more control of data, AI, and its benefits to individuals and communities. Around the world trading nations are particularly aggressive in pursuing the potential this new suite of technologies.

Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland directs MIT Connection Science, an MIT-wide initiative, and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and Forbes 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 is on the Board of the UN Foundations' Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, 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. 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. Recent invited keynotes include annual meetings of OECD, G20, World Bank, and JP Morgan.

He is a member of advisory boards for the UN Secretary General, the UN Foundation, Consumers Union, and OECD, and formerly the American Bar Association, Google, AT&T, and Nissan. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and council member within the World Economic Forum. Companies co-founded or incubated by Pentland’s lab include the largest rural health care service delivery system in the world, the news and advertising arm of Alibaba, the identity authentication technology that powers India’s digital identity system Aadahar, and rural service outlets for India’s largest payment solutions provider.