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https://twitter.com/DameWendyDBE/status/1281592159817342980 Posted on behalf of Nathaniel McInnes JP Rangaswami, Chair of the Web Science Trust, provided an inspirational view point on how the Covid-19 pandemic has taken its toll on the world and how Web Science has positively, (but also negatively) affected peoples’ lives globally. Continue reading →

Posted on behalf of Ashton Kingdon Paper 1: DeepHate: Hate Speech Detection via Multi-Faceted Text Representations Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee and Tuan-Anh Hoang This paper acknowledges that whilst there may be many traditional machine learning and deep learning methods to automatically detect hate speech on social media fora, many of these methods only consider single-type textual features and consequently neglect richer textual information that could be utilised to improve detection. Continue reading →

https://twitter.com/dder/status/1281612379973914627 Posted on behalf of Anna Kent Muller This session featured four papers around the concept of the history of AI, social machines and trust. We heard two papers (one by Zhou Shao and the other Sha Yuan)  discuss academic knowledge, and the evolution of the discipline. Continue reading →

https://twitter.com/ClareJHooper/status/1281276754137473026 Posted on behalf of Ian Brown In Thursday’s “Meet the Author” session Dame Wendy Hall (Exec Director of Southampton’s Web Science institute) spoke to Prof. Phil Howard Director of the Oxford Internet Institute about his work in Web Science and his latest book “Lie Machines”. Continue reading →

Posted on behalf of Maria Priestley Our intention behind the “Evolutionary Thinking for the Web” workshop was to explore some of the metaphors that compare the Web to an evolving ecosystem, and to discuss how this process can be studied scientifically. This year’s online conference format provided a unique opportunity to bring together academics who may otherwise not have had a chance to meet. Continue reading →

Posted on behalf of Robert Thorburn Day two of the 2020 Web Science conference saw a series of workshops covering topics ranging from Cyber Crime to Digital (In)Equality. The fourth of these workshops, chaired by Prof Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, investigated whether explanations for AI are computable. Focus areas included the participation of AI systems in socially sensitive decision making and how to approach such systems when they function as black boxes. Continue reading →

Posted on behalf of Juljan Krause In this engaging keynote, James Hendler called on everyone who researches the Web to get involved in shaping it. Jim first made clear that the Web and the Internet are not the same and explained how some of the misconceptions that people used to have played out at the time when the Web was just one of many edge network applications that sit on the Internet. Continue reading →

Posted on behalf of Sebastien Combret Keynote talk: Whose Web? A call to action for doing web science in uncertain times. Keynote speaker: Professor Gina Neff; Pauline Leonard: Programme Chair. Professor Gina Neff is a Senior research fellow and associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and department of sociology at the University of Oxford. She is a pioneer in the area of human-centred data science. Continue reading →

Posted on behalf of Nina Schuller Session on Politics:  Politics on Digital Platforms This session, chaired by Claire Hooper, explored findings from four studies on Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram. Corrado Monti and colleagues had developed predictive modelling of who would join a Reddit pro-Trump community.  They found that groups and homophily played a greater role than linguistics features. Continue reading →

Posted on Behalf of Nina Schuller Spotlight Panel 2 on Policies and Practices:  Covid 19, digital Inclusion and the issues of identity and trust   Anni Rowland-Campbell began the session by asking the Panel how they felt the Web should change, and why it should change. Each of the panellists, including Adrian Lovett, David Birch, Harriet Rees, Jie Tang, responded with presentations looking at specific policy and practice issues.  Common ground was quickly established. Continue reading →