Alex Paul Pentland

ISEA1997

Alex Paul Pentland, USA, is the Academic Head of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. He is also the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, an endowed chair last held by Marvin Minsky. He received his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1982. He then worked at SRI’s Al Center and as a Lecturer at Stanford University, winning the Distinguished Lecturer award in 1986.1n 1987 he returned to M.1.T. to found the Perceptual Computing Section of the Media Laboratory, a group that now includes over fifty researchers in computer vision, graphics, speech, music, and human-machine interaction. He has done research in human-machine interface, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, machine and human vision, and has published more than 180 scientific articles in these areas. His most recent research focus is understanding human behavior in video, including face, expression, gesture, and intention recognition, as described in the April 1996 issue of Scientific American. He has won awards from the AAA! for his research into fractals; the IEEE for his research into face recognition; and from Ars Electronica for his work in computer vision interfaces to virtual environments.