Bernardo Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a Consulting Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University.

For several years, Dr. Huberman’s research concentrated on the World Wide Web, with particular emphasis the dynamics of its growth and use. This work helped uncover the nature of electronic markets, as well as the design of novel mechanisms for enhancing privacy and trust in e-commerce and negotiations. With members of his group he discovered a number of strong regularities, such as the dynamics that govern the growth of the web, and the laws that determine how users surf the web and create the observed congestion patterns. In addition, this research helped establish and understand the winner-take-all nature of markets in the web, while leading to the design of several novel mechanisms for protecting privacy and enhancing trust in electronic communities. These results, were widely covered by the press.

Presently, his work centers on the design of novel mechanisms for discovering and aggregating information in distributed systems as well as understanding the dynamics of information in large networks. More information about the speaker can be found on the following website:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/people/huberman/

Invited talk: “Social attention in the age of the web”

The past decade has witnessed a momentous transformation in the way people interact, create and exchange information. Content is now coactively produced, shared, classified, and rated on the Web by millions of people, while attention has become an ephemeral and valuable resource that everyone seeks to acquire. This talk will describe our research on the dynamics of attention, how it plays a crucial rule in the generation of content, and the roles that popularity and novelty play in eliciting attention in the Web.