The social dynamics of individuals connected through the Internet is relevant to issues of productivity, viral marketing and the sorting out of useful ideas from the general chatter of a community. This talk will first describe a mechanism for automatically identifying communities of practice from email traffic within organizations as well as patterns in document access. Equally important is how information spreads within communities. This information has recently acquired a new dimension through the phenomenon of collaborative tagging, whereby many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content such as bookmarks, photographs and blogs. There are interesting patterns that emerge within these "folksonomies" Specifically; we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. A dynamical model of collaborative tagging predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

Bernardo Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Information Dynamics 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 has worked in condensed matter physics, and is one of the discoverers of chaos in a number of physical systems. His research into the dynamics of complex structures led to his discovery of ultradiffusion in hierarchical systems.

In the field of information sciences, he predicted the existence of phase transitions in artificial intelligence and 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. He published the book: "The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information", with MIT Press in 2001.

For several years, Dr. Huberman's research 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. These results, were widely covered by the press.

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 at Stanford University. He is co-winner of the 1990 CECOIA prize in Economics and Artificial Intelligence and he recently 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.