Bernardo Huberman - 'Social Media and Attention'

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Bernardo Huberman - "Social Media and Attention"


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 focus on how social attention is allocated among all media and how it decays as novelty fades and new content is created. This will be followed by a description of the role that attention plays in the production and consumption of content within social media, how its dynamics can be used to predict future trends, and its connection with the emergence of a public agenda.



Biographical Note

Bernardo A. Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and director of the Social Computing Research Group at HP Labs, which focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. Previous to HP, Huberman worked at Xerox PARC, where he did research on the physics of chaos, distributed systems and Internet characterization. Huberman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, former trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics and Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Huberman's main research focus is on the relationship between local actions and the global behavior of large, distributed systems. Areas of exploration include distributed knowledge, dynamics of social organizations and lately social media and the economics of attention. Much of his research has 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," with MIT Press.

Huberman 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 has been a visiting professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, the University of Paris, and Insead, the European School of Business in Fontainebleau, France.

ASSYST Scientific Meeting on Social Networks and Social Media 2012

Yasmin Merali - 'Welcome to the ASSYST Scientific Meeting on Social Networks and Social Media'

Bernardo Huberman - 'Social Media and Attention'

Sanjeev Goyal - 'Networks: contagion and resilience'

Maxi San Miguel - 'What do we learn from simple models of social behavior?'

Martin Everett - 'The dual projection approach for 2-mode networks'

Ross Anderson - 'Temporal Node Centrality in Complex Networks'

Cecilia Mascolo - 'A Study of Online Geo-Social Networks: Metrics and Applications'

Jonathan Nelson - 'Optimal and heuristic models of human information acquisition'

Philip Seib - "Real-time diplomacy: politics and power in the social media era"

Jonathan Wright - 'Social Media and the Arab Uprisings: An Agenda for Research that Goes Beyond Anecdotal Evidence' - Part 1

Jonathan Wright - 'Social Media and the Arab Uprisings: An Agenda for Research that Goes Beyond Anecdotal Evidence' - Part 2

Yasmin Meraly - 'Final remarks'