Reality Mining for Companies, or, How Social Networks Network Best

Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland is the acclaimed author of the new book Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World. Honest signals are the unconscious signals we give each other to indicate our real intentions and reactions.

Sandy has pioneered new ways of measuring these signals that yield astounding new insights into what people’s behavior really means. He’s explored how this second channel of communication defines our social networks and influences our decisions, and how to harness ‘network intelligence’ to become better managers, workers, and communicators.

He’s also developed new ways to understand group behavior using new techniques for “reality mining”—gathering data on human behavior in real life using sensors to track movement, among other things. Reality Mining was named a Breakthrough Idea of 2009 by Harvard Business Review and the same work won the Best Paper Award at the leading academic IT business conference.

A pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems and the social science of digital technology, Sandy also speaks more broadly on how to develop human-centered technologies and bring them into the world successfully.

Sandy Pentland is Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Human Dynamics Lab and oversees both the Next Billion Network established to support aspiring entrepreneurs and emerging markets and the EPROM Entrepreneurship Program in Africa.

Sandy is also a co-founder of Sense Networks, featured at Where 2.0, which brings the power of reality mining to understanding consumer behavior.