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. He founded and currently directs the MIT Connection Science an MIT-wide program which pioneered computational social science, using big data and AI to better understand human society, and the Trust::Data Alliance which is an alliance of companies and nations building open-source software that makes AI and data safe, trusted and secure. He also manages the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program which creates ventures to take cutting edge technologies into the real world. He also serves as Academic Director of Data-Pop Alliance, a joint project on big data and human development co-created with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the UK's Overseas Development Institute, and is co-founder of Imagination In Action which brings world-changing inventors together with leaders of governments and companies. 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. Pentland's research focuses on social physics, big data, and privacy. His research helps people better understand the "physics" of their social environment, and helps individuals, companies and communities to reinvent themselves to be safer, more productive, and more creative. He has previously been a pioneer in wearable computing, ventures technology for developing nations, and image understanding. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features on BBC World, Discover and Science channels. He is an advisor to Endor.com. and the Enigma project. Pentland, along with colleagues William J. Mitchell and Kent Larson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are credited with first exploring the concept of a Living Laboratory. They argued that a living lab represents a user-centric research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts. Nowadays, several living lab descriptions and definitions are available from different sources.
Publications
Honest Signals describes research chosen as Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea of the Year.
Social Physics describes research that won both the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review and the 40th Anniversary of the Internet Grand Challenge.
