MIT’s Alex Pentland: Measuring Idea Flows to Accelerate Innovation

Alex Pentland is a computational social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Human Dynamics research group at the MIT Media Lab. For decades, Pentland and his graduate students have been attaching sensors to people to study their patterns of movement and communication in work and community settings.

In the early days, the sensors tended to be big and clunky. Over the years, the mobile sensors became steadily smaller and more versatile. The current generation, called sociometric badges, are only a bit thicker than a credit card, but they can detect location, movement and a speaker’s pitch and volume (words are not recorded). Added to the mix have been the most ubiquitous personal sensors of all -- cellphones, which became popular in the 1990s. “We understood what cellphones meant,” Pentland said. “Everyone was going to run around with sensors on them.” That has led to a flood of information, a kind of big data. And in recent years, Pentland has been identified with concepts -- and terms he has coined -- related to the collection and interpretation of all that data, like “honest signals” and “reality mining.” His descriptive phrases are intended to make his point that not all data in the big data world is equal. Pentland argues that even the less valuable information in current flood of personal data could help open the door to what he calls “social physics.”