Manuel Castells, born in Spain in 1942, is Professor of Sociology, and Professor of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed in 1979 after teaching for twelve years at the University of Paris. He has also been a visiting professor in fifteen universities around the world, and an invited lecturer in hundreds of academic and professional institutions in thirty-five countries. He has published twenty books including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, published by Blackwell in 1996-2000, and translated into twelve languages. Among other appointments, he has been a member of the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on the Information Society (1995/97), and a member of the United Nations Secretary General's Advisory Board on Information and Communication Technologies (2000/2001).