Social Computing

About

The past decade has witnessed a momentous transformation in the way people interact with each other. Content is now co-produced, shared, classified, and rated by millions of people, while attention has become the ephemeral and valuable resource that everyone seeks to acquire. This talk will describe how social attention determines the production and consumption of content within both the scientific community and social media, how its dynamics can be used to predict the future and the role that social media plays in setting the public agenda.

About the speaker

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. He originally worked in condensed matter physics, ranging from superionic conductors to two-dimensional superfluids, and made contributions to the theory of critical phenomena in low dimensional systems.

In the field of information sciences, he predicted the existence of phase transitions in large scale distributed systems, and developed an economics approach to the solution of hard computational problems. Dr. Huberman is one of the creators of the field of ecology of computation, and editor of a book on the subject: "The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information" (MIT Press, 2001).

You may read more about him here .

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