We are pleased to announce that Bernardo Huberman, Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, will deliver the 2011 Windsor Lecture, "Social Media and Attention."

The event will be held January 26 from 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. in LIS Room 126. All faculty and staff are welcome to attend. The lecture begins promptly at 4:00 p.m.

Lecture abstract:

The past decade has witnessed a momentous transformation in the way people interact and exchange information with each other. Content is now co-produced, shared, classified, and rated on the Web by millions of people, while attention has become the ephemeral and valuable resource that everyone seeks to acquire.

This talk will report some of our general insights from studying this transformation in a variety of settings over the years. We'll then focus on recent insights that describe how social attention determines the production and consumption of content within social media, how its dynamics can be used to predict future trends, and how it helps determine the public agenda.

Speaker biography:

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, He originally worked in condensed matter physics, was one of the discoverers of chaos in several physical systems, established a number of universal properties in nonlinear dynamical systems.

In the field of information sciences, Dr. Huberman is one of the creators of the field of ecology of computation, and editor of a book on the subject. He published the book, The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information, with MIT Press in 2001. Dr. Huberman's research has 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. 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.

Dr. Huberman is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a former trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics and Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, as well as a faculty member in the Symbolic Systems Program and a Consulting Professor in the Department of Applied Physics, both at Stanford University. He is co-winner of the 1990 CECOIA prize in Economics and Artificial Intelligence and shared the IBM Prize of the Society for Computational Economics. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Paris, the University of Copenhagen and the European School of Business.