ANNUAL WSTNet WEB SCIENCE SUMMER SCHOOL
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

WWSSS’17, the annual Summer School in Web Science (wwsss17.com) will be held on July 1-8, 2017 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Web Science is a new interdisciplinary field seeking to understand how the Web is transforming society; for that, it uses advanced methods from both social science and computer science. The school invites participants from a wide range of disciplines interested in the Word Wide Web as a socio-technical system. It is not required to have profound knowledge in each topic, but students are expected to have a great interest in latest trends in the field, in acquiring data mining skills and in team work experience.

WWSSS is an offspring activity of the international Web Science Trust and is supervised by its steering committee that ensures its quality. WWSSS’17 is co-organized by the Laboratory for Internet Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the Laboratory of computer technologies at ITMO university . The previous school, WWSSS’16, was held at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Confirmed speakers and tentative topics
Introduction to Web Science - Wendy Hall, Director of the Web Science Institute at the university of Southampton, UK, and director of Web Science Trust
Multimedia analysis - Chua Tat-Seng, director of Extreme Search Center, National University of Singapore
Digital health and online interventions - Jeremy Wyatt, Professor of Digital Healthcare and Director of the Wessex Institute of Health & Research, university of Southampton, UK
Risky content detection online - Peter Burnap, director of Social Data Science Lab at Cardiff university, UK
Cities online - Anastasios Noulas, research associate at Computer laboratory, university of Cambridge, UK
Online experiments for psychology and wider social science - Milena Tsvetkova, postdoc researcher at Oxford Internet Institute, UK

The concept of the school
The school will include lectures tackling major trends in respective subfields of Web science, practical tutorials focused on hands-on training in data processing, analysis and methods, and team work. As promotion of interdisciplinary communication and collaboration is a key goal of the school, the teams will be formed of students from different disciplines. They will work on specific tasks linked to the datasets provided, and will be mentored by the local instructors. All teams will be expected to present the results of their work on the last day of the school. In addition, each student will have to participate in the poster session with a poster about his/her current work. School participation is conditional upon poster submission, while obtaining the school certificate is conditional upon successful team work presentation. The school will include one day of cultural / social activities in the middle, while the last day will be opened with a lecture from a Russian internet industry speaker. As the school aims at the balance between computer science and social science, it is hosted jointly by the two universities that are Russia’s leaders in the respective fields, which means that it will be held in two venues successively.

Organizing committee
Andrey Filchenkov, ITMO
Alex Farseev, NUS
Alexander Boukhanovsky, ITMO
Alexander Bugrovskiy, ITMO
Daniel Alexandrov, HSE
Dariya Yudenkova, HSE
Kseniya Buraya, ITMO
Olessia Koltsova, HSE
Sergey Koltsov, HSE
Svetlana Popova, SPbSU / ITMO
Vladimir Parfenov, ITMO
Yuri Rykov, HSE

Steering committee
Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz-Landau
Les Carr, University of Southampton
Guus Schreiber, University of Amsterdam
Conor Hayes, Digital Enterprise Research Institute
Jim Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Terms of participation
The target audience of the school is advanced graduate and PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, academic and industrial researchers and analysts. The school will be open to about 30 qualified, motivated and pre-selected candidates from around the world. Above this, up to 20 ITMO and HSE students may be accepted on the competitive basis. The working language of the school is English. School fees are: early registration - 200 euros, late registration - 300 euros. The host universities provide free participation for up to 20 students from HSE and ITMO on a competitive basis. The school offers visa support and assistance with accommodation in low-cost hostels near the school venues.


How to apply?
To apply for participation visit WWSSS’17 website (wwsss17.com) and follow the instructions.
You will have to submit the following documents:
A poster paper. Poster papers are two-page documents in English that describe applicants' early-stage, ongoing or completed research/educational projects. Research results published before and work in progress are accepted.
Resume