Bernardo Huberman

Biography

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.

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, social organizations and the economics of attention.

Much of Huberman's 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.

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 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.

 

Research interests

Bernardo'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, social organizations and the economics of attention.

Publications/Papers

• Author, The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information (MIT Press, 2001)
• Editor, Computation: the micro and the macro view (World Scientific Publishing, 1992
• Editor, The Ecology of Computation, (North Holland Publishing, 1988)
• 200 refereed papers » Full list

Awards

HP Senior Fellow

HP Fellows are pioneers in their fields, setting the standards for technical excellence and driving the direction of research in their respective disciplines.

Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

For seminal contributions to the study of complexity in distributed computational systems (2004)

Fellow of the American Physical Society

For theoretical discoveries of novel phenomena in many condensed matter systems -ranging from superionic conductors to turbulent solids (1981)

Professional Activities

• Consulting Professor, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University
• Visiting professor, Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, the University of Paris and Insead, the European School of Business in Fontainebleau, France

Patents

» Full list