Alex (Sandy) Pentland heads the Media Lab's Human Design research group, and is the founding director of Media Lab Asia. His work encompasses areas such as wearable computing, human-machine interfaces, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and machine and human vision. He is a co-founder and principal investigator for the Media Laboratory's Digital Nations consortium, of the award-winning LINCOS project, and of the Center for Future Health. He was formerly the Academic Head of the MIT Media Laboratory, and is the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.

He has won numerous international awards in the Arts, Sciences and Engineering. He was chosen by Newsweek as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape the next century. Pentland has published more than 200 scientific articles, and is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world. He is a founder of the IEEE Computer Society's Wearable Computer task force, and served as general chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing. Newsweek magazine named him one of 100 people most likely to shape the next century. Pentland did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan and received his PhD from MIT.