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The University of Southampton
Web Science Institute

Programme Overview

Web Science and AI for Future Society

Web Science is the study of people and technologies, applications, processes and practices that shape and are shaped by the World Wide Web, the largest socio-technical infrastructure in human history.  Researchers in Web Science draw together theories, methods and findings from across academic disciplines, and collaborate with industry, business, government and civil society in order to develop our knowledge and understanding of the Web.

AI and emerging technologies offer breakthroughs in data gathering and analytical capabilities that stand to disrupt businesses, industrial practices and social behaviour in positive and negative ways. However, established norms of trust and ethics are already limiting the availability of useful data for the AI industry. In addition, reliance on current data management systems and IT practices damage our ability to exploit the breakthroughs in AI. The technical data science pipelines that we currently use will cripple the AI industry unless we learn to understand the social context of data along with its limitations and the cultural, social and physical dimensions of the challenges that it is being used to address.

Programme  

The 2019 Web Science Summer School will address the inter-disciplinary fields of Web Science, Data Science and AI from a societal perspective. 

The programme sessions will include:

Full Programme Schedule

Provisional Programme

 ThemeProgramme
Sunday 8th SeptemberArrival
  • Welcome Dinner
Monday 9th SeptemberWeb Science and AI for Future Society
  • Welcome and Introduction
  • Keynote: Digital Futures - a Societal Perspective with Professor Susan Halford
  • Keynote: Digital Futures - an Industry Perspective with JP Rangaswami
  • Introduction to group projects
  • Poster session
  • Networking reception
Tuesday 10th SeptemberMachine Learning & Deep Learning
  • A high level overview of the field of AI
  • Topics to include: an introduction to Machine Learning and statistical analysis; a Python-based tutorial; Deep and reinforcement learning; natural language and text processing fundamentals; a tutorial in topic modelling on text
  • Group projects
  • City centre walking tour
Wednesday 11th SeptemberEthics & Regulation
  • Ethics in the research environment
  • Ethics in the real world
  • Group projects
Thursday 12th SeptemberData Science
  • Visit to the Data Observatory, at the Data Science Institute, Imperial College London
Friday 13th SeptemberFuture of AI
  • Keynote: Professor Dame Wendy Hall
  • Final group project presentations
  • Delegates depart

*A full programme schedule will be available soon.

Speakers

Find out more about our keynote speakers.

Registration

Find out about Registration and Fees and how to apply.

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