Human Networks Colloquium WHAT: Bernardo A. Huberman (Director, HP Labs): "The Dynamics of Information" WHEN: Tuesday, March 15, 1:00-2:00 PM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15) HOSTED BY: Judith Donath, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab SUMMARY: The dynamics of information within organizations is relevant to issues of productivity, innovation, and the sorting out of useful ideas from the general chatter of a community. How information spreads and is aggregated determines the speed with which individuals and organizations can act and plan their future activities. This talk will describe new mechanisms for automatically identifying communities of practice within organizations and for elucidating thespread of information spreads within those communities. In addition, a new method for forecasting uncertain events using small groups of people will be presented, along with empirical results that show its efficacy at making predictions in the laboratory and in the real world. BIO: Bernardo Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and director of information dynamics research at HP Labs. His current research is focused on designing novel mechanisms for accessing and aggregating disperse information, as well as enhancing privacy and trust in electronic transactions and negotiations. The main focus is the harvesting of community knowledge within organizations. Previously, Huberman's research concentrated on the World Wide Web, with an emphasis on the dynamics of its growth and use. This work helped uncover the nature of electronic markets, the detailed structure of the Web, and the laws governing the way people surf for information. One of the originators of the field of ecology of computation, Huberman recently published the book, The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information (MIT Press). Huberman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAD), 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 Symbolic Systems Program 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 was also the Chairman of the Council of Fellows at Xerox Corporation and the manager of the Internet Ecologies Group. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Paris, the University of Copenhagen, and the European School of Business. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index