The Citizen Cyberscience Centre (CCC) has entered a new phase of its research programme, focused on achieving results in the area of GIS using a collaborative thinking approach based on scientific methods. The centre is based on an international partnership between CERN, UNITAR/UNOSAT and the University of Geneva and a number of associated partners from amongst the leading academic institutions around the world.

HP Labs, an initiative of Hewlett-Packard, has a wide R&D line on Social Computing Research, 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. It is being developed by its Social Computing Lab, directed by Bernardo A. Huberman. HP Labs is an important member of the CCC family and one of their spin-offs, HP Gloe, is the subject of a collaboration sponsored by HP within CCC in the area of GIS.

On 17 March Dr. Huberman will visit CERN to meet with the UNOSAT team and gove a lecture at the IT Auditorium to expose the highlights of the research ongoing at his unit and its vision of social computing.

Dr. 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. He was one of the discoverers of chaos in a number of physical systems, and also established a number of universal properties in nonlinear dynamical systems. His research into the dynamics of complex structures led to his discovery of ultradiffusion in hierarchical systems.