About & History
Web Science Trust · WSL IIIT Bangalore · WebSciX India
Web Science Trust
The Web Science Trust (WST) is a global charitable organisation dedicated to advancing the understanding of the Web through interdisciplinary research and education. It coordinates the WSTNet — a network of leading Web Science laboratories across the world.
The WST traces its origins to the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), established in 2006 as a collaboration between MIT CSAIL and the University of Southampton, with the goal of articulating a research agenda, developing educational curricula, and providing thought leadership for the emerging discipline of Web Science.
Over time, WSRI expanded into the Web Science Trust, which today supports a global ecosystem of conferences, journals, and research collaborations. The ACM WebSci conference series, held annually, is the flagship venue for the community.
A History of Web Science
Two decades of interdisciplinary inquiry into the web as a socio-technical system
Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Dame Wendy Hall, and colleagues at MIT and Southampton. The field is named and a research agenda is articulated for the first time.
The first ACM Web Science Conference is held, establishing a global academic venue for the community. Web Science formally recognized as an interdisciplinary discipline.
WSRI transitions into the Web Science Trust, a charitable organisation, launching the WSTNet of affiliated laboratories. International reach expands rapidly.
The field deepens its engagement with social media, misinformation, and platform governance. Studies of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and online polarisation become central. Web Science methods adopted by policy bodies worldwide.
WS4D (Web Science for Development) series begins in India at IIIT Bangalore, bringing regional perspectives on the web to the global conversation. WSL IIIT-B joins WSTNet.
The emergence of large language models reshapes the field. Generative and Agentic AI become central themes: web-scale corpora, autonomous agents, and their societal consequences demand new interdisciplinary frameworks.
WebSciX India launches as the inaugural Asia-Pacific satellite of ACM WebSci, marking 20 years of the discipline and opening a sustained regional research community.
Web Science Lab at IIIT Bangalore
The Web Science Lab (WSL) at IIIT Bangalore is a WSTNet-affiliated research group focusing on how the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Artificial Intelligence shape human life — across governance, education, business, and social systems.
Originally established as the Open Systems Lab (OSL) in 2002, the lab evolved into WSL under the leadership of Prof. Srinath Srinivasa. Early foundational work, including the publication "The Power Law of Information: Life in a Connected World," anticipated many aspects of modern digital ecosystems.
The lab has contributed to digital empowerment initiatives (in partnership with Gooru Learning Inc.), the Centre of Excellence in Big Data Engineering, and a sustained line of research on narrative analysis, network science, and collective behavior in socio-technical systems. Recent work by Jayati Deshmukh and Srinath Srinivasa on computational transcendence explores how Indic systems-thinking enriches AI and multi-agent research.
WebSciX India
A regional extension of the global Web Science community
WebSciX India is modelled on the principle of bringing global research conversations into regional contexts — much as TEDx brings TED's ethos to local communities. The conference is formally constituted as an ACM Web Science satellite event.
The series builds on the Web Science for Development (WS4D) workshops held annually in India since 2019. With WebSciX 2026, the event scales to a full multi-day academic conference with proceedings, peer review, workshops, and invited speakers from across the world.