Engineering Ecosystems with AI
Sandy Pentland

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Abstract:
Our society is having difficulties engineering heterogeneous systems of people and technology. For instance, our systems for dealing with pandemics, climate change, and financial stress have been less than completely successful, in significant part because of unanticipated human behaviors. This talk will cover new approaches to engineering ecosystems that better integrate human behavior and discuss how new technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) can help.

Bio:

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. Forbes 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 one of the UN Secretary General's "Data Revolutionaries" helping to forge 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. Recent invited keynotes include annual meetings of OECD, G20, World Bank, and JP Morgan.

He is a member of advisory boards for the UN Secretary General, the UN Foundation, Consumers Union, and OECD, and formerly the American Bar Association, Google, AT&T, and Nissan. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and council member within the World Economic Forum.

Over the years Sandy has advised more than 80 PhD students. Together Sandy and his students have pioneered computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His most recent books are Building the New Economy and Trusted Data, both published by MIT Press, Social Physics, published by Penguin Press, and Honest Signals, published by MIT Press.

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and the GBC/ACM will be hybrid (in person and online), part of getting back to normal after the COVID-19 lockdown.