Alex (Sandy) Pentland of Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The pandemic has destroyed much of the world economy, and laid bare many failures in our health, finance, law, and government systems. Digital technologies can help us rebuild by enabling more resilient, effective, secure, and inclusive systems. In this talk I will discuss what world leaders, multilateral organizations (World Bank, OECD, UN, etc) and industry are discussing, and how IEEE and ACM members can contribute to these digital initiatives and help them to achieve the best possible outcomes.

Biography:

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 recently 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.

He is a member of advisory boards for the UN Secretary General and the UN Foundation, and the American Bar Association, and previously for Google, AT&T, and Nissan. He is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance . He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum.

You can read more about Sandy at https://www.media.mit.edu/people/sandy/overview/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Pentland.