WebSciX 2026

WebSciX India is the inaugural Asia-Pacific satellite event of the ACM Web Science Conference, dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary study of the Internet, World Wide Web, and Artificial Intelligence and their societal impact across India and the wider region. WebSciX builds upon the Web Science for Development (WS4D) series conducted in India since 2019.

Web Science integrates disciplines spanning computer science, sociology, economics, and policy studies to explore the socio-technical dynamics of digital ecosystems. WebSciX India aims to build a sustained regional community of researchers to investigate these dynamics within India's unique socio-cultural, economic, and technological context.

With over 800 million Internet users as of 2025, India's digital landscape is shaped by its 1.4 billion population, diverse cultures, and rapid technological adoption. India has made great strides in digital identity, payments, and public services — yet challenges around digital divides, misinformation, and data governance demand a focused regional Web Science approach.

Over two decades, Web Science has evolved from a descriptive study of hyperlink structures into a deeply interdisciplinary field integrating computational, social, economic, and regulatory perspectives. Its early phase established the web as both a technical artifact and a socio-technical system shaped by human behavior.

With the rise of Web 2.0, the field expanded to encompass user-generated content, misinformation, community formation, and platform governance. The subsequent decade saw convergence with data-intensive and AI-driven paradigms — big data, machine learning, knowledge graphs, and the Semantic Web — alongside growing attention to privacy, algorithmic bias, and ethical AI.

Today, Web Science is oriented toward understanding the web as a global critical infrastructure. The rise of Agentic AI — systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing multi-step goals with minimal human oversight — marks the defining challenge of this next decade. WebSciX 2026 invites researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to explore this frontier together.