Web Science Trust · WSL IIIT Bangalore · WebSciX India
style="position:absolute; top:24px; right:24px; height:42px; opacity:0.6; filter:brightness(0) invert(1);">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.
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.
The Web Science Lab (WSL) at IIIT Bangalore is interested in understanding how the Internet, WWW and AI affects different facets of human life. The Internet, WWW and now AI have brought about massive changes on human life in just about all facets– be it in business, administration, social well-being, personal relationships, education, etc. While these technologies continue to evolve at a rapid pace, there is relatively little attention given to how we as humans are transforming in this new world.
Originally established as the Open Systems Lab (OSL) in 2002, the lab evolved into the now WSL Lab,IIIT Bangalore. Early foundational work, including the publication "The Power Law of Information: Life in a Connected World," anticipated many aspects of modern digital ecosystems.
Today, the lab's research spans network science, computational social science, human–AI interaction, and the societal implications of large-scale automation and agentic systems — themes that directly inform the WebSciX conference series and its focus on the web as critical, agent-populated infrastructure.
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.