Alex 'Sandy' Pentland

I'm Sandy Pentland. I grew up in a very blue-collar place, where some kids at my junior high carried guns. I earned my PhD at MIT in 1982, joined the faculty in 1986, and helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab. In the late 1990s, while setting up labs in India, I watched a board make poor choices because its members had too much charisma. That pushed me to study honest signals, the unspoken cues in how we talk. Today at Stanford I work on digital democracy and AI that stays loyal to the people it serves. Ask me about the water cooler that made workers more productive.