Web Science Trust selects 2023 winner of Test of Time award

May 1, 2023 | Conference, News, WebSci Conferences

The annual Web Science Trust (WST) Test of Time Award has been awarded to Nam P. Nguyen (Towson University), Guanhua Yan (Binghamton University), My T. Thai (University of Florida) and Stephan Eidenbenz (Los Alamos National Laboratory) for their work titled “Containment of Misinformation Spread in Online Social Networks”. The authors are the second group of researchers being awarded the WST Test of Time Award.

The award was announced during the awards ceremony of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference, adding a ceremonial highlight to a successful conference in Austin, Texas.

The paper was first presented at the 2012 ACM Web Science Conference in Evanston, Illinois and selected by a WST Test of Time Award Committee. The Committee selected the work on a method for containing the spread of misinformation in social networks for its continued high impact and relevance and timeliness in today’s world. The Committee said the following on its choice: “Our rationale was that the paper tackles an important problem via theoretical (mathematical) ground work, simulation, and data analysis and most importantly it finishes with some pragmatic solutions.”

The recipients of this year’s award follow in the steps of Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech), Scott Counts (Microsoft Research) and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) who were presented with last year’s inaugural award.

Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Trust, who announced the winners of the award during the awards ceremony, said: “The Web Science Trust is delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Test of Time Award.  The paper has been well-cited and is still timely and relevant”.

Dr. Ágnes Horvát, Northwestern University, who chaired the ToT Award Committee, said: “The paper was ahead of its time, alerting the WebSci community to the problem of misinformation when people were mostly celebrating participatory aspects of social media. Misinformation feeds on inequalities and proliferates during times of crisis, aligning the paper with this year’s conference theme.”

The authors commented: “We are very honored to receive this award. We would like to thank the Web Science Trust for recognizing our work on this still very pressing problem in our modern time, when social media has become an integral part of our lives”. 

 

Their acceptance speech is shown below.  

 

About the Web Science Trust Test of Time Award

The Web Science Trust Test of Time Award was inaugurated in 2022 and will be awarded annually to the author or authors of a paper presented at a previous Web Science Conference that has stood the test of time through continued relevance and impact. The recipients of the award will receive a monetary prize, and an engraved award.

About the ACM Web Science Conference

The Web Science Conference has been held every year since 2009 and has been an ACM conference since 2011. It is a vibrant, interdisciplinary gathering engaging not only with Web Science researchers but with related and complementary disciplines.  The series has produced nearly 800 publications that have been downloaded more than 250,000 times. The conference is organized each year by a local team of volunteers in different parts of the world in collaboration with the Web Science Trust. 

About the Web Science Trust

The Web Science Trust (WST) is a charity promoting the understanding of the World Wide Web through education and research in the discipline of Web Science. We engage in both academic and public outreach, and coordinate the Web Science Trust Network (WSTNet) of laboratories from around the world.

Read the Paper

WebSci’23 Travel Grants

Mar 19, 2023 | Conference, News, WebSci Conferences

15th ACM Web Science Conference: Inequalities in the Face of Concurrent Crises
30 April – 1 May 2023
Austin, Texas, USA (and online)
https://websci23.webscience.org/

WebSci and SIGWEB are pleased to announce the availability of a fund to help support attendance to WebSci 2023 in Austin, TX, USA.

Travel Grants
WebSci’23 travel grants provide support up to $1,500 for students, early career scholars and other presenters from underrepresented regions, who have an accepted paper at the conference and submit scholarship applications by March 26, 2023. In the event that scholarship applications exceed available funds, preference will be given to presenters from underrepresented regions who are planning to attend the whole Web Conference. This fund offsets travel costs but won’t cover registration.

To apply for the Travel Grant Program, please complete the online application at the link below no later than March 26, 2023. Notifications will be sent by March 31.

Free Online Tickets (for virtual attendance)
WebSci free online tickets are intended to help students to attend the conference virtually. In the event that requests exceed available tickets, preference will be given to students who are presenting a paper and those who are from underrepresented regions. To apply for a free ticket, please complete the online application at the link below by March 26, 2023.

To apply for either kind of support, kindly submit this very simple form: https://forms.gle/pLvQg7vjwYpXieXLA

Best wishes

WebSci’23 Conference Committee

Call for Interest: WebSci’24 and WebSci’25

Jan 5, 2023 | Conference, News, WebSci Conferences

Deadline: 3 February 2023

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The Steering Committee of ACM WebSci is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 16th or 17th ACM Web Science Conferences (WebSci 2024 and WebSci 2025). The conference series usually moves between the continents.  We will accept bids from all locations, but for the 2024 conference, we will give preference to bids within Europe and for the 2025 conference, we will give preference to bids outside Europe. We expect the conference to take place in June/July each year. Co-location with other ACM conferences will be considered and hosting the conference as a hybrid event is encouraged.  Please include a statement on how you would propose offering remote attendance.

The process consists of two stages. During this first stage, the Steering Committee solicits informal statements of interest through an open call. We will prefer statements that commit to running an event with low registration costs encouraging participants from all disciplines, including ones with lower financial provisions.

Organizations wishing to host the conference should contact Susan Davies (sdd1@soton.ac.uk) with a short paragraph outlining your interest, which should include the main organizer, the proposed venue and potential dates. Any organization can apply to host the conference, but the local organizing committee must include a representative of a local research group.

Once the first phase is complete, the Steering Committee will shortlist applications who will be invited to submit a full proposal.

The important dates for applying to host the Conferences are:

Friday 3 February:  Deadline for receiving statements of interest
Friday 17  February:  Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out
Friday 31 March: Formal applications received from shortlisted bids

We will be in touch with successful applicants in mid-April.

It is anticipated that the venue for ACM WebSci 2024 will be announced at this year’s conference in Austin, Texas. 

ACM WebSci’22: Call for participation

Jun 6, 2022 | Conference, News, WebSci Conferences

It is still time to register for this year’s ACM Web Science Conference!

The ACM Web Science Conference will take place in Barcelona on June 26-29, 2022 and will be co-located with UMAP’22 and HT’22 conferences. WebSci’22 is organized as a hybrid conference and will also enable online participation.

Registration
Registration fees start at 50,- Euro (online attendance, student rate). Additional options for discounted tickets are available (including a limited number of free admissions for researchers from countries designated as “economically developing”). All details about registration fees can be found online.

Conference Program
You can access the full conference schedule with the keynotes and all the paper sessions, including topics such as “Crowds and Social Movements”, “Health” and “Harmful Content Detection”.

The conference will feature two keynotes and we are excited to announce our invited speakers: m.c. schraefel(University of Southampton) and Leila Zia (Wikimedia Foundation).

We are also happy to announce the accepted workshops and tutorials for this year, which cover a wide range of topics and are open for participation:

  • General Collective Intelligence and Web Science
  • Documenting Web Data for Social Research (#DocuWeb22)
  • 1st Workshop on Blockchain and AI for Community
  • Assessing The Ethical Implications Of Artificial Intelligence In Policing
  • Coornet: detecting problematic online coordinated link-sharing behavior

Also, we encourage you to attend and register to Brave Conversations side event that will also run on Sunday 26th.

PhD Posters
We are considering the option to host posters for phd candidates to present their thesis topics and/or for late breaking research results during the conference as a networking opportunity. In case you would be interested in presenting your phd topic or recent research as a poster onsite in Barcelona, please reach out to us before June 10th.

All the information is available at https://websci22.webscience.org/

The WebSci’22 organizing committee

WebSci21 – Video Vault No 11 – The Future of the Web and Society

May 15, 2022 | Conference, Media, News, Vault, Video, WebSci Conferences

Chair, Wendy Hall leads panellists, Sinan Aral, Azeem Azhar, Noshir Contractor and Jaime Teevan in a discussion no less ambitious than to summarise what we learned from the last 15 years of Web Science and to predict what the next 15 years may hold.

Keynote 5

Abstract

Web Science, as an interdiscipline, is celebrating its 15th year of interrogating how the Web has shaped Society and how Society, in turn, has shaped the Web. During this period, we have witnessed avalanches of disruptive “exponential” technologies emerge from tectonic shifts between four (or more!) Internets with their various sensibilities and sensitivities concerning openness, commerce, authoritarianism and human rights. The closing panel reflects on how all of these socio-cultural-political developments (re)shape the agenda for Web Science over the next 15 years and beyond. Specifically, panelists will consider the future of Web Science research and what it means for practitioners, policy makers and publics.

Summary


Chair, Wendy Hall leads panellists in a discussion to summarise what we learned from the last 15 years of Web Science and to predict what the next 15 years may hold.

About the Video Vault Series

In partnership with the ACM we are pleased to be able to release a series of videos from the most recent Web Science Conference (ACM WebSci’21) that were previously only available to attendees of the conference.

The series will be released fortnightly and will include a selection of Keynote talks and Spotlight panel discussions.

Copyright / Links

This video is (c) 2021 provided under license from the ACM.

 

WebSci21 – Video Vault No 10 – The Post-API Age Reconsidered

Apr 28, 2022 | Conference, Media, Vault, Video, WebSci Conferences

In this talk, Deen Freelon talks about research data sourced from social media platforms to support computational research approaches in social science .

Keynote 5

Notes

Despite its brevity, the essay “Computational research in the post-API age” (Freelon, 2018) sparked an interdisciplinary discussion about options for collecting and analyzing social media data at a time when platforms were imposing tight restrictions on their formerly open APIs or closing them altogether. This keynote will explore some of what has and has not changed in the ensuing three years for computational researchers interested in social media data. In particular, it will focus on three key issues that have increased greatly in prominence since 2018: (1) the process of collaborating directly with social media companies on research projects, (2) the ethics of hacked and leaked datasets, and (3) ethno-racial and gender inequities in web- and computational social science.

Freelon, D. (2018). Computational research in the post-API age. Political Communication, 35(4), 665-668.

Summary


Deen Freelon talks about research data sourced from social media platforms to support computational research approaches in social science and whether both accessibility and representation have changed in the intervening period since his influential 2018 paper.

About the Video Vault Series

In partnership with the ACM we are pleased to be able to release a series of videos from the most recent Web Science Conference (ACM WebSci’21) that were previously only available to attendees of the conference.

The series will be released fortnightly and will include a selection of Keynote talks and Spotlight panel discussions.

Copyright / Links

This video is (c) 2021 provided under license from the ACM.