The University of Southampton celebrated 10 years of Web Science at a vibrant event at the Royal Society in London yesterday to officially launch the new Web Science Institute (WSI) which brings together the activities of the Web Science Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT), the Southampton/Fraunhofer joint venture (SoFWired), co-operations with other Web Science research groups via the Web Science Trust (WST) as well as more easily integrating interdisciplinary research from departments across the university.
Institute Directors Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Susan Halford, together with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, were joined by other leading figures from Web and internet science, including the University’s newly appointed Visiting Professor Liam Maxwell, Government Chief Technology Officer, in a panel-led discussion on future developments. JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com and Richard Susskind OBE, author, speaker and IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales also generously gave of their time to deliver keynote presentations that were both entertaining and insightful.
We are indebted to Alex Hovden for LiveBlog‘ing the event
The event also featured a Web Science Exhibition showcasing the Southampton Doctoral students’ research, SoFWIReD developments, the Web Observatory and the SOCIAM project, which examines the theory and practice of social machines in partnership with the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh. SOCIAM features use of a Web Observatory as an academic instrument to study the mechanisms and dynamics of social machines and is cast as “a social machine for studying social machines”. The Exhibition included stands from the Open Data Institute, the Web Foundation and NOW Publishers.