Alex "Sandy" Pentland

Professor, MIT

Reality Mining for Companies, or, How Social Networks Network Best
26 minutes, 12.1mb, recorded 2009-05-20
Alex

Join Alex "Sandy" Pentland as he talks about the indoor spaces of the city and the answers that can be gleaned from human movements within the interiors of buildings. Tapping into the potential of the phone to mine customer and employee location data within an organization leads to interesting results. From the movement of ants to how coffee breaks are scheduled, location based software can show habits that encourage and discourage productive behavior.

Arguing that greater information exchange leads to more productive workers. Managers can tap into a live feed of location information to determine actions that improve employee workflow. Large amounts of social graphing can also be used to better market and advertise to people with a degree of clarity that previous generations of marketers could only dream of. Collecting social data carries with it certain ethical obligations and Pentland calls for companies to ensure that organizations which collect this data ensure that it belongs to the people from whom it is collected by disclosing their individual results.


Alex "Sandy" Pentland is the Toshiba Professor at MIT, an entrepeneur, and one of the most-cited authors in computer science. His research focuses on the development of human-centred technology, and the creation of ventures that take this technology into the real world. He is the diretor of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab and Next Billion Network.

Resources

This free podcast is from our Where Conference series.

For The Conversations Network:

  • Post-production audio engineer: Jamie Rinehart
  • Website editor: Brett Ballanger
  • Series producer: Peter Christensen

Photo: Sandy's MIT Website