Manuel Castells holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and is professor emeritus of sociology and city/regional planning at UC Berkeley. He received doctorates in sociology and human sciences from the Sorbonne, joining Berkeley's faculty in 1979; for five years he also directed the Institute for Sociology of New Technologies at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He is author, co-author, or editor of many books, most recently The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective and Mobile Communication and Society. His trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture has been widely translated. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the C. Wright Mills Award from the American Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government. He serves on the Advisory Council to the U.N. Task Force on Information and Communication Technology and the U.N. Secretary General's panel on Global Civil Society.