Call for Interest: WebSci’24 and WebSci’25
Deadline: 3 February 2023 ********************************************************************************************************** The Steering Committee of ACM WebSci is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 16th...
Book Release: Digital Modernity
In this monograph, O’Hara reviews the literature that characterises what is called digital modernity. Digital modernity narratives focus on the possibilities of the data gathered by an ambient data infrastructure, enabled by ubiquitous devices such as the smartphone,...
WebSci’23 Call for Papers
About the Web Science Conference Web Science is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex and multiple impacts of the Web on society and vice versa. The discipline is well situated to address pressing issues of our time by incorporating various...
In Conversation with: George Metakides
In this interview we sit down with Prof. George Metakides, one of our esteemed WST trustees, to talk about democracy in the digital space and why you should be concerned. Ian: George, thanks very much for taking the time to chat with me today. George: Always pleased...
Rutgers: Welcome to WSTNet
Please join me in welcoming Matt Weber as the new WSTNet Lab Director part of the NetSci group in the School of Information and Communication at Rutgers. We'll be interviewing Matt in the upcoming weeks to talk about his group, his research interests and how how he...
WebSci’23: Call for Papers
Call for Papers About the Web Science Conference Web Science is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex and multiple impacts of the Web on society and vice versa. The discipline is well situated to address pressing issues of our time by...
Resilent Government: a new paper
Data has tremendous potential to build resilience in government. To realize this potential, we need a new, human-centred, distinctly public sector approach to data science and AI, in which these technologies do not just automate or turbocharge what humans can already...
Instagram receive GDPR fine from Irish data watchdog
Instagram have been accused of failing to safeguard the data of underage users by the Irish data watchdog (DPC). Meta, Instagram's parent company, have said they plan to appeal the fine which has been set at $400m and is centered around allowing minors (13-17) to set...
Welcome to WSTNet : University of Stuttgart
In this interview we welcome a new lab team and an old friend of Web Science Ian: Steffen, thanks for joining us - it seems a little unusual to welcome you as a new Lab Director when you ran one of our other Labs at Koblenz for many years but your team are new so a...
Web Science Trust selects inaugural winner of Test of Time award
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...
R.I.P. Internet Explorer
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...
Brave Conversations @ WebSci’22
Our next Brave Conversations event is coming up in a month’s time as a part of the 2022 Web Science Conference in Barcelona. The event will be held both in Barcelona (if you are keen to come along or live in Barcelona) or online via Zoom starting at 3 pm Central...
ACM WebSci’22: Call for participation
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...
Clearview fined £7.5m by Data Protection Watchdog
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued an enforcement notice ordering Clearview AI to cease collecting and using the personal data of UK residents, and to delete any such data that it may have stored on its systems on the grounds that 'People were not...
Jim Hendler on the History of the Semantic Web
WST Trustees Jim Hendler speaks abou the history of the Semantic Web on this recent Podcast. In this episode of The Index, host Alex Kehaya joins James Hendler, one of the originators of the semantic web and the Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and...
New WST White Paper on Privacy
Law has granted individuals some rights over the use of data about them, but data protection rights have not redressed the balance between the individual and the tech giants. A number of approaches aim to augment personal rights to allow individuals to police their...
In conversation with: Jennifer Zhu Scott
In conversation this time is well-known finance and digital economy expert, Jennifer Zhu Scott. Jen recently joined the WST Board of Trustees and we are delighted to welcome her. Ian Brown sat down to find out a little more about Jennifer's (Jen’s) path to Web Science...
WebSci21 – Video Vault No 11 – The Future of the Web and Society
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.[dipl_image_card...
WSTNet Lab Profile: Cardiff HateLab
Cardiff University is the home of a WSTNet lab with two related, but distinct groups: Pete Burnap's Social Data Lab (based on data visualisation and analysis using COSMOS) which makes social media analysis much more accessible for non-coding academics and also Matt...
Early NFT investor embarrassed by no resale interest
The recent surge in NFT coverage in tyhe technology and financial press was typified by the story of an early NFT auction in which an investor paid $2.9m for an NFT linked to Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey's first ever Tweet on the platform. This, it was claimed, was an...