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Alex 'Sandy' Pentland

Professor Post Tenure of Media Arts and Sciences
Contact Information:
Groups
Project Research

Crowdsourcing purchase histories

We crowdsourced and published a first-of-its-kind open dataset that contains Amazon purchase histories, spanning 2018 to 2022, from more th…
Project Research

Zero-knowledge (ZK) Tax

zkTax is a zero-knowledge tax disclosure system that allows individuals to make provable claims about select information in their tax retur…
Project Research

Data Provenance for AI

A massive audit of 1800+ AI text datasets, tracing their provenance and composition from origin to creation.The race to train language mode…
Project Research

Measuring and reducing social segregation in cities

We use high-resolution geospatial data collected from mobile phones to measure social segregation at an unprecedented resolution in cities …
Project Research

The Atlas of Opportunity

The Atlas of Opportunity is a platform that allows communities to derive insights from their own data. The tool was created in collabo…
Project Research

Voyage Viewer

Voyage Viewer is an online, open source interactive tool especially designed to visualize and study human mobility and migration.
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Resilience Across Scales

Resilience Across Scales is a research theme that encompasses the work of a few Media Lab Principal Investigators and their research groups…
Project Research

Safe Paths

Papers from SafePaths: https://github.com/PrivateKit/PrivacyDocumentsSafe Paths is an MIT-led, free, open source technology that …
Project Research

Assessing Disease Exposure Risk With Location Histories And Protecting Privacy

Governments and researchers around the world are implementing digital contact tracing solutions to stem the spread of infectious disease, n…
Project Research

BASIC: Blockchained Agent-based Simulator for Cities

Autonomous vehicles (AVs), drones, and other types of robots will revolutionize our way of traveling and understanding urban space. In orde…
Project Research

The Atlas of Inequality

Segregation is hurting our societies and especially our cities. But economic inequality isn't just limited to neighborhoods. The restaurant…
Project Research

Data for Refugees

Data for refugees is a big data challenge whereby Turk Telekom opens a large dataset of anonymized mobile phone records to research groups …
Project Research

Social Capital Accounting

To better understand and improve the quality of our lives, there has been a need for measuring non-economic capital such as social capital …
Project Research

Urban Swarms

Modern cities have to respond to the growing demands of more efficient and sustainable urban development, as well as an increased quality o…
Project Research

Improving official statistics in emerging markets using machine learning and mobile phone data

Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies in the developing world with global penetration rates reaching 90%. Mobile phone …
Project Research

Collective sensemaking in cryptocurrency community

Participants in cryptocurrency markets are in constant communication with each other about the latest coins and news releases. Do thes…
Project Research

Active Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making

Algorithmic FairnessSociety increasingly relies on machine learning models for automated decision making. Yet, efficiency gains from automa…
Project Research

OPAL 4 Health

Open Algorithms (OPAL)
Project Research

Blockchain: A new framework for robotic swarm systems

Swarms of robots will revolutionize many applications, from targeted material delivery to farming. However, the characteristics that make t…
Project Research

RoboChain: A secure data-sharing framework for human-robot interaction

A learning framework for secure, decentralized, computationally efficient data and model sharing among multiple robot units installed at m…
Project Research

Secure Sharing of Wildlife Data

Leveraging the power of platforms, big data, and advanced analytics for species protection and the public good in a privacy-preserving, sca…
Project Research

The Ripple Effect: You are more influential than you think

The well-known "small-world" phenomenon indicates that an individual can be connected with any other in the world through a limited number …
Project Research

Social Physics of Unemployment

Earlier studies proved that behavior is highly shaped and constrained by one's social networks, and demonstrated ways in which individuals …
Project Research

Managing Travel Demand: Location recommendation for system efficiency

Growth in leisure travel has become increasingly significant economically, socially, and environmentally. However, flexible but uncoordinat…
Project Research

Recurrent neural network in context-free next-location prediction

Location prediction is a critical building block in many location-based services and transportation management. This project explores the i…
Project Research

DeepShop: Understanding purchase patterns via deep learning

The recent availability of quantitative behavioral data provides an opportunity to study human behavior at unprecedented scale. Using large…
Project Research

Social Bridges in Community Purchase Behavior

The understanding and modeling of social influence on human economic behavior in city environments can have important implications. In this…
Project Research

bandicoot: A Python toolbox for mobile phone metadata

bandicoot provides a complete, easy-to-use environment for researchers using mobile phone metadata. It allows them to easily load their dat…
Project Research

On the re-identifiability of credit card metadata

Even when real names and other personal information are stripped from metadata datasets, it is often possible to use just a few pieces of i…
Project Research

Accuracy-Risk Trade-Off Due to Social Learning in Crowd-Sourced Financial Predictions

A critical question relevant to the increasing importance of crowd-sourced-based finance is how to optimize collective information processi…
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Enigma

A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private.…
Project Research

Leveraging leadership expertise more effectively in organizations

We believe that the narrative of only listening to experts or trusting the wisdom of the crowd blindly is flawed. Instead we have developed…
Project Research

Open Badges

We present Open Badges, an open-source framework and toolkit for measuring and shaping face-to-face social interactions using either custom…
Project Research

Data-Pop Alliance

Data-Pop Alliance is a joint initiative on big data and development with a goal of helping to craft and leverage the new ecosystem of big d…
Project Research

Mobile Territorial Lab

The Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) aims at creating a "living" laboratory integrated in the real life of the Trento territory in Italy, open …
Project Research

openPDS/ SaferAnswers: Protecting the privacy of metadata

In a world where sensors, data storage, and processing power are too cheap to meter, how do you ensure that users can realize the full valu…
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Incentivizing cooperation using social pressure

Cooperation in a large society of self-interested individuals is notoriously difficult to achieve when the externality of one individual's …
Project Research

Sensible Organizations

Data mining of email has provided important insights into how organizations function and what management practices lead to greater producti…