We sat down with Professor Noshir Contractor to discuss the news of his appointment as the new Executive Director of the Web Science Trust, how we got to this point, and his vision for WST over the coming period.
Ian
Noshir, let me be the latest to congratulate you on your appointment as Executive Director of the Web Science Trust. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
Noshir
Thanks, Ian; I’m looking forward to the new role – it’s a tremendous opportunity.
Ian
Web Science is not a new concept for you, and you were already on the Board of Trustees before this appointment. Can you tell us about the “journey” and how you got to this point? What attracted you in the first place?
Noshir
You are right—I’ve been involved in Web Science since giving a keynote talk at the very first WebSci conference in Athens in 2009. I was acutely aware and honored to be a social scientist keynote speaker at a conference ostensibly about technology. This emphasis on interdisciplinarity and the appreciation of the role of social science in understanding/shaping technology has been a critical feature of Web Science since its earliest beginnings and one of its defining qualities.
In my case, my undergraduate area of study was Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. But, I was always fascinated, not only by the technologies themselves (say, email or the Internet) but also by the social impact of technology. We saw disruptive social impacts following the invention of pivotal technologies like the printing press, the steam engine, and the telephone, and, more recently, we are engaging with highly transformative digital networking technologies that are not only a topic of technical study in and of themselves but, unlike those earlier technologies, networks like the World-Wide Web, are also an invaluable source of data about how they are used: a canvas on which to study the technical and social elements (socio-technical systems) of networks at scale.
This convergence of digital networks, human interactions, and large amounts of data (metadata) produced by their use has ultimately shaped my interests: Web Science, Network Science, and Computational Social Science, each with its own flavor and focus but demanding interdisciplinary expertise to understand their design and applications, as well as their recursive interrelationship with society.
Ian
With new leadership in an organisation often comes a new vision and new objectives. What elements of WST will remain the same, and what might you change or extend?
Noshir
We should remember that Web Science was an entirely new discipline in 2006 (just 18 years ago), which is a very short time in academic terms, and the first piece of that history (under the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) – the predecessor of WST) was spent defining a distinct new area of scholarly research: the questions and challenges it was designed to address, the key objectives, the tools and methods, the curricula for teaching and most importantly, creating the seeds of an academic network of labs (the WSTNet) at the cutting edge of research who would build new expertise, share skills/findings and champion the Web Science approach. To coordinate activities and define policy, a Board of Trustees was invited to establish an oversight and strategy function with other leading luminaries from academia, industry, non-profits, NGOs and governments to advise them.
The net result of that early work by the Board was to generate academic interest in a novel perspective on the Web with the publications of articles in Scientific American, Science, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer, and others, a series of books, a Dagstuhl workshop, a Web Science journal, a Web Science Manifesto and a host of papers defining a new science of the Web and its associated challenges. We have created 16 annual WebSci conferences (generously sponsored by the ACM and SIGWEB) featuring more than 850 papers downloaded over 320,000 times. Over this period, we have run dozens of summer schools, educational and civic outreach meetings, and workshops with WSTNet labs, industry sponsors, and our partners, Brave Conversations. With all this, the Web Science message has been heard!
In many ways, our original objectives have been completed with the creation of a new interdiscipline, an associated ACM conference, hundreds of Web Science PhDs (including yours, Ian!), and a network of more than 20 Web Science Labs in the US, Asia, and Europe. However, our success has been much more significant than these numbers suggest, as we now see what we recognize as Web Science across the modern research landscape in many different disciplines. We recently produced a successful Web Science podcast series called “Untangling the Web,” which I hosted. In the series, we interviewed 35 thought leaders about their contributions to Web Science. While few guests might have a priori identified as Web Scientists, the conversations helped them quickly recognize how each was pivotal in advancing Web Science’s intellectual and societal vision..
What have we learned throughout this period? That the challenges are COMPLEX, the data is MULTIDIMENSIONAL, and the techniques/approaches are CONTEXTUAL (Interdisciplinary) because we are dealing with human actions/reactions across Nigel Shadbolt’s famous Web Science “butterfly,” i.e., different social, geographical, ethical, legal, religious, economic (et al.) contexts. Given that very few individuals will have the multiple skills required to address even mildly complex problems, web science is not only interdisciplinary but also a “team science” in that collaboration across different areas of expertise is fundamental.
Ian
With all the groundwork done, does this mean that WST’s job is essentially over, or is there more to do? What about AI, for example?
Noshir
Our early efforts at incubating Web Science have now been “retired”: Our specialist Web Science journal is no longer needed as Web Science has become pervasive. Our research is welcomed in an extremely wide choice of contemporary disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals. Our early teaching curriculum work has been replaced by our manifesto, which we believe will be more robust against inevitable technical changes.
Is it over, though? Our colleague and Web Science Trust Board member, Jim Hendler, speaks for all of us when he recently proclaimed the motto, “Web Science: Now more than ever!”. While we have helped plant and germinate the seeds of Web Science and we’ve seen that grow over the past ten years, we are accurately aware that the Web is now more entangled with society than ever before and that new challenges and opportunities are mounting at an exponential scale. Just as Web Science was well positioned, in the past decade to understand the design and societal impacts of social media (web 2.0), today Web Science is exceptionally well poised to understand the (re)emergence of AI powered by LLM’s – which would be inconceivable without their insatiable reliance on data and computer capability from the Web. To understand the design of Generative AI, the policies and ethics surrounding their use, and their societal impacts on the future of work, and democratic society.
Ian
What does this engagement look like?
Noshir
We have board members advising national governments and the UN on AI. For past decade, we have been studying hybrid collections of humans and non-human “actors” as they interact on the Web realising a vision of a “Social Machines” first articulated by the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee. We are witnessing a move from “humans in the loop” to putting “AI agents in the group.”
The various actors engage with other human and non-human actors (bots, algorithms, GPTs), which affects how the different actors react and engage in a complex evolving model of adaptive behavior. Historically, we’ve completed much of what I’ll call computational social science on the interactions between human actors across networks. Still, the newer challenge is to identify and understand the interactions between human actors and non-human (broadly speaking) AI Actors.
– Can we tell which actors are non-human? Should we interact differently with them? Who is responsible/liable for their actions? Who owns (has rights to) their output?
– Are their objectives/behaviours/liabilities technically and legally indistinguishable from the programmer’s objectives/behaviours, or do behaviours and liabilities vary/evolve as they engage with other actors?
We now need more significant parts of the Web Science community – though not all parts 😉 To focus on the technical aspects of generative AI (LLMs and GPTs) and bot creation/deployment to do their part to understand the social impacts and ethics and feed into the roadmaps to “shepherd” these technologies into modern society in a digestible, non-damaging way. This will require more collaboration between mSTNet labs, and I want to focus on promoting our network of labs more than ever before. We should work harder than ever to share tools, techniques, data, and people to form our global membership’s brightest and best interdisciplinary teams.
I aim to re-energize the WSTNet with ideas around co-teaching, mentoring, sharing resources, exchanging resources, and looking for co-funding sources to enable complex interdisciplinary research. WST will put more time, money, and resources into supporting our network over the coming period to build a stronger, more collaborative global COMMUNITY that will attract its research funding and, in turn, more members to a more extensive, more diverse network.
As part of that work with the WSTNet members (and our growing list of partners), we want to do more outreach with other parts of academia, government, and industry to re-emphasize the need for the Web Science approach to explore both the opportunities and the risks that arise from complex global networked systems, which are increasingly the home of misleading information/messaging and autonomous agents with unknown agendas.
Ian
It sounds like the job may never be completely over, and you are certainly aiming for some really interesting outcomes and challenging work. I’m sure we all wish you and the network every success, and once again, congratulations on your appointment.
