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HAL R. VARIAN is the Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a Professor in the Haas School of Business, a Professor in the Department of Economics, and holds the Class of 1944 Professorship.
He received his S.B. degree from MIT in 1969 and his MA (mathematics) and Ph.D. (economics) from UC Berkeley in 1973. He has taught at MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Michigan and other universities around the world.
Professor Varian is fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and is currently on the editorial boards of several journals.
He is affiliated with the Fisher Center for Information Technology, the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, the Law and Technology Center at the Boalt School of Law, and the Center for Telecommunications Policy Research.
He is also working with the INDEX project, which is an attempt to measure demand for various kinds of Internet quality of service.
Professor Varian has published numerous papers in economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks which have been translated into 9 languages. His recent work has been concerned with the economics of information technology and the information economy.
He recently coauthored a book titled Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Summer 1998, Harvard Business School Press.
In general, publishers---even nonprofit publishers---will want to provide different services to different classes of users. In other words: when you add a cool new feature to your digital library software, make sure you have a way to turn it off!
-Hal R. Varian
International Perspectives on Universal Service: Myths, Realties, and Madness Plenary Session
This session will explore the notion of "universal service" in a global networked environment and describe the current status of establishing universal service in such an environment. Key issues, problems, and strategies will be presented to help identify the myths, realities, and madness that comprise selected policy debates regarding the development of universal services globally. Participants will also offer strategies that might improve access to and use of networked information resources and services in a global context.
Charles R. McClure, Syracuse University
John C. Bertot, University at Albany, State University of New York
Jean-Claude Burgelman, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (invited)
Andrew Magpantay, Director of the Office for Information Technology, ALA
Milton Mueller, Syracuse University
Others to be announced
HERBERT A. SIMON's research has ranged from computer science to psychology, administration, and economics, and philosophy. The thread of continuity through all his work has been his interest in human decision-making and problem-solving processes, and the implications of these processes for social institutions. In the past 25 years, he has made extensive use of the computer as a tool for both simulating human thinking and augmenting it with artificial intelligence.
Simon was educated in political science at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1936, Ph.D., 1943). He has held research and faculty positions at the University of California (Berkeley), Illinois Institute of Technology, and since 1949, Carnegie Mellon University, where he is Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology.
In 1978, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 1986 the National Medal of Science; in 1969, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, in 1975 the A.M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (with Allen Newell), in 1988, the John von Neumann Theory Prize of ORSA/TIMS, and in 1995, the Research Excellence Award of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
He is recognized as part-founder of Artificial Intelligence (though he thought ``complex information processing'' a better name at the time), of cognitive science and of computer science.
Simon's writings include Administrative Behavior, Human Problem Solving, jointly with Allen Newell, The Sciences of the Artificial, Scientific Discovery, with Pat Langley, Gary Bradshaw, and Jan Zytkow, three volumes of his collected economics papers (Models of Bounded Rationality), two volumes of collected psychology papers (Models of Thought), a volume of papers on philosophy of science (Models of Discovery), and his autobiography, Models of My Life.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- Herbert Simon
