Alex Pentland
Biographic Data
| ID | 120547 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Pentland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Pentland |
| SIGNATURE | PENTLAND A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8053-9983 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Investigating neighborhood adaptability using mobility networks: A case study of the Covid-19 pandemic
What predicts a neighborhood’s adaptability to essential public health policies and shelter-in-place regulations that prevent the harmful spread of COVID-19? To answer this question, we present a novel application of human mobility patterns and human behavior in a network setting. We analyze 2 years of mobility data (January 2019 to December 2020) from New York City and construct weekly mobility networks between census block groups based on aggre…
Behaviour-based dependency networks between places shape urban economic resilience
Disruptions, such as closures of businesses during pandemics, not only affect businesses and amenities directly but also influence how people move, spreading the impact to other businesses and increasing the overall economic shock. However, it is unclear how much businesses depend on each other during disruptions. Leveraging human mobility data and same-day visits in five US cities, we quantify dependencies between points of interest encompassing…
Are neighbourhood amenities associated with more walking and less driving? Yes, but predominantly for the wealthy
Cities are home to a vast array of amenities, from local barbers to science museums and shopping malls. But these are unequally distributed across urban space. Using Google Places data combined with trip-based mobility data for Bogotá, Colombia, we shed light on the impact of neighbourhood amenities on urban mobility patterns. By deriving a new accessibility metric that explicitly takes into account spatial range, we find that a higher density of…
Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding
Flexible social inference facilitates targeted social learning when rewards are not observable
Mobility patterns are associated with experienced income segregation in large US cities
Traditional understanding of urban income segregation is largely based on static coarse-grained residential patterns. However, these do not capture the income segregation experience implied by the rich social interactions that happen in places that may relate to individual choices, opportunities, and mobility behavior. Using a large-scale high-resolution mobility data set of 4.5 million mobile phone users and 1.1 million places in 11 large Americ…
Unraveling the association between socioeconomic diversity and consumer price index in a tourism country
Diversity has tremendous value in modern society. Economic theories suggest that cultural and ethnic diversity may contribute to economic development and prosperity. To date, however, the correspondence between diversity measures and the economic indicators, such as the Consumer Price Index, has not been quantified. This is primarily due to the difficulty in obtaining data on the micro behaviors and macroeconomic indicators. In this paper, we exp…
Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help Covid-19 containment
The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by…
Bayesian collective learning emerges from heuristic social learning
Researchers across cognitive science, economics, and evolutionary biology have studied the ubiquitous phenomenon of social learning-the use of information about other people's decisions to make your own. Decision-making with the benefit of the accumulated knowledge of a community can result in superior decisions compared to what people can achieve alone. However, groups of people face two coupled challenges in accumulating knowledge to make good …
Spillovers across industries and regions in China’s regional economic diversification
Industrial diversification depends on spillovers from related industries and nearby regions, yet their interaction remains largely unclear. We study economic diversification in China during the period 1990–2015 and present supportive evidence on both spillover channels. We add to the literature by showing that these two channels behave as substitutes when explaining new entries and exits, and by using acceleration campaigns of high-speed rail to …
Mobile phone data for informing public health actions across the Covid-19 pandemic life cycle
This paper describes how mobile phone data can guide government and public\nhealth authorities in determining the best course of action to control the\nCOVID-19 pandemic and in assessing the effectiveness of control measures such\nas physical distancing. It identifies key gaps and reasons why this kind of\ndata is only scarcely used, although their value in similar epidemics has\nproven in a number of use cases. It presents ways to overcome these…
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration
How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly…
Turkers of the World Unite: Multilevel In-Group Bias Among Crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Crowdsourcing has become an indispensable tool in the behavioral sciences. Often, the “crowd” is considered a black box for gathering impersonal but generalizable data. Researchers sometimes seem to forget that crowdworkers are people with social contexts, unique personalities, and lives. To test this possibility, we measure how crowdworkers ( N = 2,337, preregistered) share a monetary endowment in a Dictator Game with another Mechanical Turk (MT…
Modelling the impact of testing, contact tracing and household quarantine on second waves of Covid-19
Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios: The 'Data for Refugees Challenge' Study
Machine behaviour
Can an Emoji a Day Keep the Doctor Away? An Explorative Mixed-Methods Feasibility Study to Develop a Self-Help App for Youth With Mental Health Problems
Today's smartphones allow for a wide range of "big data" measurement, for example, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), whereby behaviours are repeatedly assessed within a person's natural environment. With this type of data, we can better understand - and predict - risk for behavioral and health issues and opportunities for (self-monitoring) interventions. In this mixed-methods feasibility study, through convenience sampling we collected data …
Winning Models for Grade Point Average, Grit, and Layoff in the Fragile Families Challenge
In this article, the authors discuss and analyze their approach to the Fragile Families Challenge. The data consisted of more than 12,000 features (covariates) about the children and their parents, schools, and overall environments from birth to age 9. The authors' modular and collaborative approach parallelized prediction tasks and relied primarily on existing data science techniques, including (1) data preprocessing: elimination of low variance…
Fair, Transparent, and Accountable Algorithmic Decision-making Processes: The Premise, the Proposed Solutions, and the Open Challenges
Sensing Informal Networks in Organizations
We present an examination of informal network structure within the sales division of a global manufacturing organization. Sociometric Badges were used to collect data on face-to-face interactions over a total of 8 weeks, the latter half of which was spent in a redesigned workspace. These data were supplemented by employees' e-mail and instant messaging log activity. The allocation of an individual's communication among colleagues reflected the co…
Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks: A Dynamic Social Network Study
Partnership ties shape friendship networks through different social forces. First, partnership ties drive clustering in friendship networks: individuals who are in a partnership tend to have common friends and befriend other couples. Second, partnership ties influence the level of homophily in these emerging friendship clusters. Partners tend to be similar in a number of attributes (homogamy). If one partner selects friends based on preferences f…
Big Data and Management
Sociometric badges: Using sensor technology to capture new forms of collaboration
This article introduces sociometric badges as a research tool that captures with great accuracy fine‐scale speech patterns and body movements among a group of individuals at a scale that heretofore has been impossible in groups and teams studies. Such a tool offers great potential for studying the changing ecology of team structures and new modes of collaboration. Team boundaries are blurring as members disperse across multiple cultures, convene …
Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
Meeting of Minds The performance of humans across a range of different kinds of cognitive tasks has been encapsulated as a common statistical factor called g or general intelligence factor. What intelligence actually is, is unclear and hotly debated, yet there is a reproducible association of g with performance outcomes, such as income and academic achievement. Woolley et al. (p. 686 , published online 30 September) report a psychometric methodol…
Productivity Through Coffee Breaks: Changing Social Networks by Changing Break Structure
Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding
Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks: A Dynamic Social Network Study
Partnership ties shape friendship networks through different social forces. First, partnership ties drive clustering in friendship networks: individuals who are in a partnership tend to have common friends and befriend other couples. Second, partnership ties influence the level of homophily in these emerging friendship clusters. Partners tend to be similar in a number of attributes (homogamy). If one partner selects friends based on preferences f…
Modelling the impact of testing, contact tracing and household quarantine on second waves of Covid-19
Spillovers across industries and regions in China’s regional economic diversification
Industrial diversification depends on spillovers from related industries and nearby regions, yet their interaction remains largely unclear. We study economic diversification in China during the period 1990–2015 and present supportive evidence on both spillover channels. We add to the literature by showing that these two channels behave as substitutes when explaining new entries and exits, and by using acceleration campaigns of high-speed rail to …
Sociometric badges: Using sensor technology to capture new forms of collaboration
This article introduces sociometric badges as a research tool that captures with great accuracy fine‐scale speech patterns and body movements among a group of individuals at a scale that heretofore has been impossible in groups and teams studies. Such a tool offers great potential for studying the changing ecology of team structures and new modes of collaboration. Team boundaries are blurring as members disperse across multiple cultures, convene …
Winning Models for Grade Point Average, Grit, and Layoff in the Fragile Families Challenge
In this article, the authors discuss and analyze their approach to the Fragile Families Challenge. The data consisted of more than 12,000 features (covariates) about the children and their parents, schools, and overall environments from birth to age 9. The authors' modular and collaborative approach parallelized prediction tasks and relied primarily on existing data science techniques, including (1) data preprocessing: elimination of low variance…
Behaviour-based dependency networks between places shape urban economic resilience
Disruptions, such as closures of businesses during pandemics, not only affect businesses and amenities directly but also influence how people move, spreading the impact to other businesses and increasing the overall economic shock. However, it is unclear how much businesses depend on each other during disruptions. Leveraging human mobility data and same-day visits in five US cities, we quantify dependencies between points of interest encompassing…
Flexible social inference facilitates targeted social learning when rewards are not observable
Sensing Informal Networks in Organizations
We present an examination of informal network structure within the sales division of a global manufacturing organization. Sociometric Badges were used to collect data on face-to-face interactions over a total of 8 weeks, the latter half of which was spent in a redesigned workspace. These data were supplemented by employees' e-mail and instant messaging log activity. The allocation of an individual's communication among colleagues reflected the co…
Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
How understanding the signaling within social networks can change the way we make decisions, work with others, and manage organizations.How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Alex Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our …
Honest signals: How They Shape Our World
How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate sig…
Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data
Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals. This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also d…
Computational Social Science
A field is emerging that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data at a scale that may reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors.
Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
Meeting of Minds The performance of humans across a range of different kinds of cognitive tasks has been encapsulated as a common statistical factor called g or general intelligence factor. What intelligence actually is, is unclear and hotly debated, yet there is a reproducible association of g with performance outcomes, such as income and academic achievement. Woolley et al. (p. 686 , published online 30 September) report a psychometric methodol…
Productivity Through Coffee Breaks: Changing Social Networks by Changing Break Structure
Sociometric badges: Using sensor technology to capture new forms of collaboration
This article introduces sociometric badges as a research tool that captures with great accuracy fine‐scale speech patterns and body movements among a group of individuals at a scale that heretofore has been impossible in groups and teams studies. Such a tool offers great potential for studying the changing ecology of team structures and new modes of collaboration. Team boundaries are blurring as members disperse across multiple cultures, convene …
Big Data and Management
Sensing Informal Networks in Organizations
We present an examination of informal network structure within the sales division of a global manufacturing organization. Sociometric Badges were used to collect data on face-to-face interactions over a total of 8 weeks, the latter half of which was spent in a redesigned workspace. These data were supplemented by employees' e-mail and instant messaging log activity. The allocation of an individual's communication among colleagues reflected the co…
Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks: A Dynamic Social Network Study
Partnership ties shape friendship networks through different social forces. First, partnership ties drive clustering in friendship networks: individuals who are in a partnership tend to have common friends and befriend other couples. Second, partnership ties influence the level of homophily in these emerging friendship clusters. Partners tend to be similar in a number of attributes (homogamy). If one partner selects friends based on preferences f…
Fair, Transparent, and Accountable Algorithmic Decision-making Processes: The Premise, the Proposed Solutions, and the Open Challenges
Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios: The 'Data for Refugees Challenge' Study
Machine behaviour
Can an Emoji a Day Keep the Doctor Away? An Explorative Mixed-Methods Feasibility Study to Develop a Self-Help App for Youth With Mental Health Problems
Today's smartphones allow for a wide range of "big data" measurement, for example, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), whereby behaviours are repeatedly assessed within a person's natural environment. With this type of data, we can better understand - and predict - risk for behavioral and health issues and opportunities for (self-monitoring) interventions. In this mixed-methods feasibility study, through convenience sampling we collected data …
Winning Models for Grade Point Average, Grit, and Layoff in the Fragile Families Challenge
In this article, the authors discuss and analyze their approach to the Fragile Families Challenge. The data consisted of more than 12,000 features (covariates) about the children and their parents, schools, and overall environments from birth to age 9. The authors' modular and collaborative approach parallelized prediction tasks and relied primarily on existing data science techniques, including (1) data preprocessing: elimination of low variance…
Mobile phone data for informing public health actions across the Covid-19 pandemic life cycle
This paper describes how mobile phone data can guide government and public\nhealth authorities in determining the best course of action to control the\nCOVID-19 pandemic and in assessing the effectiveness of control measures such\nas physical distancing. It identifies key gaps and reasons why this kind of\ndata is only scarcely used, although their value in similar epidemics has\nproven in a number of use cases. It presents ways to overcome these…
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration
How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly…
Turkers of the World Unite: Multilevel In-Group Bias Among Crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Crowdsourcing has become an indispensable tool in the behavioral sciences. Often, the “crowd” is considered a black box for gathering impersonal but generalizable data. Researchers sometimes seem to forget that crowdworkers are people with social contexts, unique personalities, and lives. To test this possibility, we measure how crowdworkers ( N = 2,337, preregistered) share a monetary endowment in a Dictator Game with another Mechanical Turk (MT…
Modelling the impact of testing, contact tracing and household quarantine on second waves of Covid-19
Mobility patterns are associated with experienced income segregation in large US cities
Traditional understanding of urban income segregation is largely based on static coarse-grained residential patterns. However, these do not capture the income segregation experience implied by the rich social interactions that happen in places that may relate to individual choices, opportunities, and mobility behavior. Using a large-scale high-resolution mobility data set of 4.5 million mobile phone users and 1.1 million places in 11 large Americ…
Unraveling the association between socioeconomic diversity and consumer price index in a tourism country
Diversity has tremendous value in modern society. Economic theories suggest that cultural and ethnic diversity may contribute to economic development and prosperity. To date, however, the correspondence between diversity measures and the economic indicators, such as the Consumer Price Index, has not been quantified. This is primarily due to the difficulty in obtaining data on the micro behaviors and macroeconomic indicators. In this paper, we exp…
Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help Covid-19 containment
The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by…
Bayesian collective learning emerges from heuristic social learning
Researchers across cognitive science, economics, and evolutionary biology have studied the ubiquitous phenomenon of social learning-the use of information about other people's decisions to make your own. Decision-making with the benefit of the accumulated knowledge of a community can result in superior decisions compared to what people can achieve alone. However, groups of people face two coupled challenges in accumulating knowledge to make good …
Spillovers across industries and regions in China’s regional economic diversification
Industrial diversification depends on spillovers from related industries and nearby regions, yet their interaction remains largely unclear. We study economic diversification in China during the period 1990–2015 and present supportive evidence on both spillover channels. We add to the literature by showing that these two channels behave as substitutes when explaining new entries and exits, and by using acceleration campaigns of high-speed rail to …
Are neighbourhood amenities associated with more walking and less driving? Yes, but predominantly for the wealthy
Cities are home to a vast array of amenities, from local barbers to science museums and shopping malls. But these are unequally distributed across urban space. Using Google Places data combined with trip-based mobility data for Bogotá, Colombia, we shed light on the impact of neighbourhood amenities on urban mobility patterns. By deriving a new accessibility metric that explicitly takes into account spatial range, we find that a higher density of…
Computer Science (24 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Mathematics (7 works)