PROSPERITY - Key Persons

Prof Alex "Sandy" Pentland

Job Titles:
  • Director of the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative
  • Founding Faculty Director
Alex "Sandy" Pentland is founding faculty director of the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative, which uses network science to access and change real-world human behavior, and is the Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also holds a triple appointment at MIT in Media Arts and Sciences, Engineering Systems Division and with the Sloan School of Business.

Stephen C. Buckley

Job Titles:
  • Executive Director
  • Executive Director of the Connection Science and Human Dynamics Programs at MIT
Stephen serves as the Executive Director of the Connection Science and Human Dynamics programs at MIT, and is the key management lead, with responsibility for managing a team of faculty, staff and... Read More Stephen serves as the Executive Director of the Connection Science and Human Dynamics programs at MIT, and is the key management lead, with responsibility for managing a team of faculty, staff and students, in creating an innovation-centric culture, to produce robust implementations of research software. Liaising with key external stakeholders, he increases awareness of, and engagement in, the programs, initiatives, and projects. Previously, during his long career at MIT, Stephen served as Technical Director at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL). Earlier, he served as Director of Systems Engineering, reporting to MIT's CIO. He is the founder of the MIT CIO Summit, the MIT CIO Symposium, and the MIT Kerberos Consortium. Stephen received the Andrew W. Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration in 2007.

Thomas Hardjono

Job Titles:
  • Technical Officer
  • CTO of MIT Connection Science
  • Technical Director for the Trust
Thomas Hardjono is the CTO of MIT Connection Science and Engineering. He leads technical projects and initiatives around identity, security and privacy in emerging technologies such as IoT, smart... Read More Thomas Hardjono is the CTO of MIT Connection Science and Engineering. He leads technical projects and initiatives around identity, security and privacy in emerging technologies such as IoT, smart contracts and blockchain systems, and engages industry partners and sponsors on these fronts. Thomas is also the technical director for the Trust::Data Consortium under MIT Connection Science that implements open source software based on cutting edge research at MIT. Prior to this Thomas was the Director of the MIT Kerberos Consortium, developing the famous MIT Kerberos authentication software currently used by millions of users around the world. As an industry expert he has been active in the areas of security, applied cryptography and identity management for nearly two decades now, starting from the mid-1990s working in the emerging PKI industry as Principal Scientist at VeriSign as the largest PKI provider in the world. He has led a number of key industry technical groups within the IETF, OASIS, Trusted Computing Group, Kantara and other organizations. Aside from MIT Kerberos, he has been instrumental in the development of the OpenID-Connect 1.0 (OIDC) and the User Managed Access (UMA) identity management protocols. He is also spearheading exploratory work on core identities, open algorithms and verifiable transaction identities for blockchain systems. Over the years he has published four books and over sixty technical papers in journals and at conferences.