Web Science workshop in Bangalore, India marks a new WSTnet Lab

IIIT-Bangalore Workshop on Web Science for Development 12-14th Feb 2020

WST exec Dame Wendy Hall is being hosted by IIIT-Bangalore as part of a Web Science for Development series. 

WS4D 2020 Registration: Click Here

The World Wide Web (WWW) is the biggest information construct that the world has ever seen. Nothing like the web ever existed in recorded human history. The web is neither a natural phenomenon, nor is it an artificially engineered system. It is the result of trillions of human decisions made independently. As the web and associated technologies like mobile computing makes inroads into most aspects of our lives, there is a growing urgency to understand how it is affecting humanity as a whole. The interdisciplinary study of Web Science was born in 2006 as a result.

The Web Science for Development (WS4D 2020) workshop is part of the Web Science Research Initiative at IIIT Bangalore. WS4D 2020 is a workshop that brings together professionals from several domains, addressing relevant issues of WWW and humanity.

WS4D 2020 is organised as a 3-day event. The first day on Feb 12th, features an activity called Brave Conversations in partnership with the Web Science Trust and the British Deputy High Commission at India.

The second day Feb 13 2020, features a series of talks by several eminent researchers, practitioners and policy-makers on various topics pertaining to digital societies. Prof. Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, and Prof. Manish Gupta, head of Google AI Research in India, would be delivering keynote addresses.

Brave Conversations Bangalore Feb 12th 2020

Brave Conversations Bangalore

In association with the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, the British Deputy High Commission Bengaluru, the Web Science Institute, University of Southampton, and the Web Science Trust.

WHEN February 12 2020, 9am – 5pm WHERE IIIT-Bangalore Bengaluru, India 560100

Conference Room in the main Administrative Block near Reception, please follow signs. Limited parking available.

WSL: wsl.iiitb.ac.in

REGISTER NOW

Registration:  Info: www.braveconversations.org/bangalore-2020

Objectives

The goal of Brave Conversations is to challenge and also empower everyone who participates. There is no pre-requisite of knowledge or expertise, and we seek to encourage as diverse a group of participants as possible from all walks of life, ages and stages.

We will explore the decisions that we make on a minute by minute basis and impact us all on a personal, community, societal and planetary level, in order to make explicit how our engagement with social technologies is changing everything.

IIIT-Bangalore hosts India’s first Web Observatory

India’s first web observatory was launched at the International Institute of Information Technology–Bangalore on Tuesday.

The observatory was launched by Prof S Sadagopan and Prof Dame Wendy Hall at a workshop on web science attended by scientists from India and the United Kingdom, jointly organised by IIIT-Bangalore and the British High Commission.

Sadagopan stressed the growing importance of research in web science and noted that the web, be it in business, governance or in personal life, has had a major role to play. He termed web science a game-changer for a growing economy like India.

Prof Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, the UK, said, “The web has changed lives irrevocably and the observatory is crucial in providing the data and data analytics to support evidence-based policy making and business intelligence in the future. It is great to see the development of the observatory at IIIT-B as the first step of the evolution of network of web observatories in India.”

Analytics platform  
The web observatory provides a global, distributed analytics platform that not only provides access to datasets of various sizes but also helps analyse the web.

It has been set up in partnership with the Web Science Trust, the University of Southampton and other global web science laboratories.

The web observatory is planned to be a worldwide grid hosting datasets relevant to web science research. IIIT-B will host the first such node of the grid in India which will be managed by the Web Sciences Lab.

Similar web observatories exist in European, Southeast Asian and American universities.

 Article from the Deccan Herald

 

Web Science Trust Directors host private dinner at the WWW 2011 Conference in Hyderabad, India

WST Directors Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt hosted a private dinner this week at the Novotel Hyderabad Convention Centre, coinciding with the WWW 2011 Conference. 

Distinguished guests from both industry and academia, including Microsoft Research India, Wipro Technologies, W3C India, Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, International Institute of Informtion Technology, Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, were able to discuss the Trust’s plans to grow Web Science activity in India, particularly through the establishment of Web Science Research Laboratories.

Before dinner Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, outlined the importance of Web Science for Industry, academia, government and global society at large.