The Web Science Trust (WST) announced today that the inaugural Web Science Trust Test of Time Award was presented to the authors of the paper “Social media as a measurement tool of depression in populations”, Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech), Scott Counts (Microsoft Research) and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research).  The authors are the first recipients of this newly established annual award.

 The award was presented during the opening ceremony of the 14^th ACM Web Science Conference hosted by the ICT department of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. 

 The paper was first presented at the 2013 ACM Web Science Conference in Paris, France and will be re-presented during a keynote presentation on Wednesday 29 June during this year’s conference.

 Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Trust, who announced the award at the opening ceremony, said: “The Web Science Trust is delighted to announce the winners of our first Test of Time Award.  It was hard choosing between some of the wonderful papers that have been presented over the last decade but the trustees felt that this paper captured an important analysis of nearly 70 thousand user posts to develop a novel social media depression index—helping us to understand more about the society that we shape (and that shapes us) through the Web. The paper has been well-cited and the issue of mental health certainly retains much relevance today.”

The authors commented: “We are very honoured to be the first recipients of this award and would like to thank the Web Science Trust for recognizing our 2013 paper and the direction of research that it represents.”

 The ACM Web Science Conference 2022 will run as a hybrid conference from 26-29 June, where authors will present their work either in-person or remotely to participants gathering at the conference venue in Barcelona, or joining online, and will be co-located with the ACM Hypertext Conference and the ACM UMAP Conference.  The Web Science Conference is an interdisciplinary conference where a multitude of research disciplines converge with the purpose of creating greater insight into a complex global Web which is more impactful than the sum of their individual parts.

From Today Microsoft will no longer offer support for Internet Explorer (IE) which racked up 11 versions from its debut 22 years ago in 2015.

Microsoft had already flagged that it was retiring Internet Explorer for some time but given Microsoft users famous reticence to give up older versions of its operating systems and apps time will tell if they will all move to Microsoft Edge. There was a mixed reaction on social media ranging from fond nostalgia to some tounge-in-cheek teasing with one user calling it “the top browser for installing other browsers” Today IE joins a growing list of other browsers founded by Netscape Navigator that are just unable to topple Google Chrome from its 65% market share.