Sandy Pentland
About
Alex "Sandy" Pentland is an American computational social scientist at MIT, where he directs the Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. He helped create and direct the MIT Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital's Center for Future Health, and has advised the World Economic Forum among other bodies.[1]
He is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in computational social science, organisational engineering, mobile computing, image understanding and modern biometrics. His research group and entrepreneurship programme have spun off more than twenty companies. He has advised over fifty doctoral students, a large proportion of whom now hold faculty positions or lead industry research groups — Thad Starner among them.
Key Ideas
- Reality mining. Pentland's group coined the term for the use of continuous sensor data from mobile phones — location, proximity, call and message patterns — to infer social structure and behaviour at population scale. The 2004 MIT Reality Mining study, which instrumented around a hundred phones for nine months, established the method and remains a reference dataset.
- Honest signals. Set out in Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World (MIT Press, 2008). Pentland argues that a substantial portion of the outcome of human interactions — negotiations, interviews, pitches, dates — is predictable from non-linguistic behavioural signals: activity level, influence, mimicry and consistency. These are measurable without any access to the content of the conversation, using a wearable "sociometric badge" his group developed.
- Social physics. The programme of his 2014 book of the same name: that patterns of idea flow through a social network can be measured and modelled with the same quantitative apparatus used for physical systems, and that "engagement" and "exploration" are the two variables that predict a group's productivity and creativity.
- Data ownership and the New Deal on Data. Pentland has argued consistently that the value of behavioural data should accrue to the people who generate it, proposing personal data stores and rights of possession, use and disposal. He was influential in the framing of the World Economic Forum's work on personal data.
Criticism
The research programme has attracted substantive objection on three grounds. The first is behaviourist reduction: critics argue that treating the content of speech as noise and its rhythm as signal discards precisely what makes human interaction meaningful. The second concerns the politics of the metaphor — "social physics" implies laws, and laws imply that social arrangements are natural rather than chosen, a criticism with a long history running back to Comte, who used the same phrase. The third is practical: the same instrumentation that enables the research enables workplace surveillance, and sociometric badges have been marketed as productivity monitoring tools. Pentland's data-ownership advocacy is in part a response to this.
Selected Works
- Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World (2008)
- Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread — The Lessons from a New Science (2014)
- Building the New Economy (2021), co-edited
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Pentland represents the quantitative wing of the same subject this site treats qualitatively: what happens to social life when everyone carries a sensor. His work is worth reading both for its findings and as an object of study in its own right — an argument that human behaviour is measurable at population scale, produced by people who then have to decide what to do with the measurements.
Related Reading
References
- ↑ Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, MIT Media Lab.
