Web ScienceWhat? Why? Really?

Panel at WI-IAT 2009

Milan, 17-09-2009, 13.45-14.30 Chair: Bettina Berendt (K.U. Leuven)

Web Science

“The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to... – understand what the Web is– engineer its future– ensure its social benefit...we need a new interdisciplinary field that we

call Web Science.“

... an excursion into politics ...

• Pirate Parties - “Internet Parties”– civil rights including privacy (data

retention and surveillance, Internet censorship)

– intellect. property / copyright /…Qs– transparency of government and

political processes– consciously block-independent

along traditional political scales

• An often-heard criticism:You can't take positions just on Internet issues – there is no “just Internet”!

Whose positions do you represent?

... therefore we want to ask:

• “... we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science.“

• What is it?

• Which disciplines / areas ?

• Who defines it ?

• Do we?

Contributors and areas

• Ricardo Baeza-YatesYahoo! Research Europe & Latin America; U. Pompeu Fabra Barcelona

• Simon BachelierParis Descartes Université & Université Diderot Paris

• Jaideep VaidyaRutgers University

• Gabriella PasiUniversità degli Studi di Milano Bicocca

• Dirk BollenUniversity of Technology Eindhoven

Education

Art

Questions for the Panel• A new science?

– Do you do WS? If so, how?– What is WS (according to you)?– What is the (Web) Intelligence in WS? – Do we need a SCIENCE? (Ricardo: "earth science", but not "car science")– What disciplines should be involved?– Focus on developing paradigms or objects-to-think-with?– What would you be able to do in a WSs Institute / Degree, that you can't do today?

• Content:– What do you see as the main weakness/deficiency of today's scientific dealings

with the Web - and therefore as the number one challenge for research?– Ditto for applications– Ditto for political/economic/social dealings with the Web?

• Institutional– What would your ideal WSs Centre look like? In research? In teaching? In

applications?– How can WS inspire teaching - at universities, at schools - maybe also the teaching

of other content?– What discipline/s would lose most students (and funding?) if WS takes off?– What would you expect as the biggest danger if WS becomes institutionalised?

Let‘s start!

Web Science?

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Yahoo! Research

New Science?• How much knowledge do you

cover?

• Must a new science have something new?

• How hard it is to start?

• Science of an abstraction?– Concept – tool - applications

• Do we need it?

What is Web Science?• I still do not know!

• There are examples in the papers

• Do you cover all possible applications of the Web?

• Or just focus on the Web as communication channel plus the technology behind it?

What could be Web Science

• Yes: Internet economics, scientific computation in the Internet, user experience understanding, digital social networks, etc.

• No: e-health, e-science, e-learning, ....

• Internet science!

L3S Hannover

Web Science!

– AIW

Simon Bachelier

Paris Descartes Université & Université Diderot Paris

What is AIW ?

What is AIW ?

Interdisciplinary

Approaches

of the Web

Interdisciplinary

Approaches

of the Living

How it works ?

- Student can come from many fields and have different profile and background.

- Motivation of the student is the most important criterion.

What kind of "student profile" would fit for the AIW master ?

- Students are free to design their own project and develop their ideas to progress in their research.

- They are framed by specialists from different field & area (scholars, expert, professional) who will help them to progress in their research domain.

What are the main values/ideas ?

- Develop an education where it is possible to learn how to create and reinforce new concepts.

How it works ?

The program

How it works ?

About the clubs

- Interdisciplinary Approaches of Information Digital information & the Web Cultural information & Teaching Models & concepts)

- Handling of data & complex networks Teaching programming lessons Analysing complex dataTopology of social networks

- History of the Web From Arpanet to Web 2.0

To conclude…

The Privacy View

Jaideep Vaidya

Rutgers University

jsvaidya@business.rutgers.edu

Questions• A new science?

– Do you do WS? If so, how?

– What is Web Science (according to you)?– What is the (Web) Intelligence in WS?

– Do we need a SCIENCE? – What disciplines should be involved?– Focus on developing paradigms or objects-to-think-with?– What would you be able to do in a WSs Institute / Degree, that you can't do today?

• Content:

– What do you see as the main weakness/deficiency of today's scientific dealings with the Web - and therefore as the number one challenge for research?

– Ditto for applications

– Ditto for political/economic/social dealings with the Web?

• Institutional– What would your ideal WSs Centre look like? In research? In teaching? In applications?– How can WS inspire teaching - at universities, at schools - maybe also the teaching of other

content?– What discipline/s would lose most students (and funding?) if WS takes off?– What would you expect as the biggest danger if WS becomes institutionalised?

What is Web Science?

• Science of the web?– Amalgamation of different technologies– Or more than a sum of parts?

• My view– The web is a driver for new technological

development• Making people aware of problems

• And solutions

– Enabling new applications of old technologies– Integrating cyber-physical and social systems to the

extreme

• Standardization is the key

Why is privacy critical?

• With the ever increasing amounts of data collected and disseminated, privacy is at grave risk– Health data (electronic health records)– Social network data (facebook, myspace, linkedin)– Financial data (online banking)– …

• The privacy threshold for different sites is amorphous– We have a bare minimum for specifying policies– Limited tools for enforcement or auditing

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No holistic treatment of privacy

• Pertinent research in many related fields– Secure Multiparty Computation (Cryptography)– Database privacy– Network security– Medical privacy (HIPAA)– Other Academic Fields

• Law, Social Science

Why is the web different? i.e., do we need a new science?

• Data is ever changing• Data is across organizational, and even

national boundaries– Legal safeguards are widely divergent

• Very difficult to anticipate ways in which data is misused– EU specifications require intent (and thus are difficult

to enforce)

• Widely varying levels of security and privacy protection across sites

• Web 2.0 and above will allow seamless interaction between autonomous agents, thus vastly increasing the privacy risk 28

What is necessary?

• A new (more granular) way of talking about privacy– Ways to quantify privacy– Ways to specify privacy– Ways to enforce privacy– Economic models for privacy

• Better privacy models – privacy does not simply mean presence or absence in a dataset– More specific legislation – a la consumer protection

laws

• Exploration from the incentive perspective– Game theory

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Who should be involved?

• Technologists / Computer Scientists• Social Scientists • Lawyers• Users• Governments

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Knowledge – ontologies!

Gabriella Pasi

Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca

Knowledge – ontologies?

Dirk Bollen

University of Technology Eindhoven

What’s important for an intelligent web

• Capturing dynamics of the web• Grounding knowledge

Dynamics

•What is the web environment?:–Dynamic

•Static websites

•Blogs (change fast)

•twitter (change faster)

•The environment in which the web is situated in is often neglected when thinking about a knowledge structure

•The environment and knowledge structure should be coupled

Grounding knowledge

• How to represent knowledge and the relationship between this knowledge in a dynamic environment?

• Ontologies– Has the structure and a way of defining the relationship between representation– But problem with capturing the dynamics of the web– Most successful in well defined domains

• Tagging: – Captures the dynamics of the web– but lacks the structure and has problems defining the relationship between the

representation it is generating– Successful on the web

What do we need?

• A formalism that captures the dynamics of the web– Interaction between knowledge representation and environment– Describing and analyze phenomena we observe

• Need intelligent methods and algorithms that run on the web– E.g. Intelligent algorithms that update and create new representations and

relationships between those representations• When to update representation and the relationship between it • When not to do so• Not like weekly updates

– E.g. Intelligent algorithms that make new connection/combinations between knowledge on the web

Evolution of webscience

• There are some parallels with the evolution of situated cognition

• Situated cognition was a reaction against traditional cognitive science

• Different researches in different research field began rethinking intelligence

• New paradigm to describe intelligence that could capture the dynamic and relationship of cognitive with the environment it was situated in

• This led to a new perspective on the structure, representation and relationship between this representations in human cognition

Thank you!

Questions?