The Web Science Initiative is host to a variety of interdisciplinary research projects across a broad range of computing topics. We have identified four major areas which currently form the focus of web science research at Georgia Tech: Social Computing, Networking, Computational Journalism and Theory. Each of these areas is headed by a faculty member who works to coordinate the research activities between their area and the web science research community at Georgia Tech.
Research
| Social Computing |
| Research in social computing explores how social connections facilitated by the Internet are reshaping education, entertainment, business, and research. In social computing research, we both study real-world systems in use, and also create new systems. Our experimental online systems both can accomplish a specific concrete goal (for example, helping high school students to learn about science), and also contribute to our fundamental knowledge of the design of online communities and how particular design features shape the user behavior that emerges. |
| Area Coordinator: Amy Bruckman |
| Networking |
| The Networking research thrust of the Web Science Initiative covers the three network levels of the Web: (1) its underlying computer network, the Internet; (2) the network interconnecting static and dynamic web pages and media; (3) the many new application-layer networks that exist on the Web, such as online social networks, product recommendation networks, or peer-to-peer networks. We currently have active research covering each of these levels, in the areas of Internet evolution, Internet economics, Web mining and search, diffusion of information in online social networks, dynamics of recommendation networks, and others. |
| Area Coordinator: Constantine Dovrolis |
| Computational Journalism |
| Advances in computational technology are rapidly affecting how news information is gathered, reported, distributed, and consumed. The aim of computational journalism is to understand journalism in light of computational advancements and to develop novel technologies which reinforce the objectives and values of journalism. Our goals are to develop new technologies to support professional journalists, to develop tools for citizen-journalists to help in sharing their perspectives on an event, and to advance the state of the art in the consumption and sense-making of news information. |
| Area Coordinator: Irfan Essa |
| Theory |
| The Theory research area focuses on formal models and algorithms for World Wide Web applications, including the web itself, communication and social networks, and e-commerce. Models are important for simulation, prediction and mechanism design. Algorithms include efficient information communication and retrieval for very large data sets, as well as scenarios from algorithmic game theory, where network elements are selfish agents and the network performs without centralized control. The theory group is also in close collaboration with the critical area of network security. |
| Area Coordinator: Milena Mihail |
Recent Publications
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Proceedings of Hawaiian International Conference of Systems Sciences (HICSS-41). Big Island, HI, January 7-10, 2008.
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Journal of Marketing Research, 45(2), 2008.
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In Proceedings of International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008). Beijing, China, April 21-25, 2008.
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ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, 2(1), 2008.
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In the Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT). New York, NY, December 2007.
Ongoing Research
Faculty and students affiliated with the Web Science Initiative are currently involved in the following research centers, labs and projects.
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The ARC ThinkTank brings together faculty from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, along with Math and ISyE to find algorithms and algorithmic models for real-world problems across the sciences and, in the process, seeking new directions and techniques for the emerging theory of algorithms.
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The BizLab at Georgia Tech's College of Management brings together researchers across multiple business disciplines who study human behavior. Working at the convergence of economics and psychology, BizLab researchers use observational and experimental methodologies to examine such topics as information search, judgment and decision making, group behavior, information sharing and communication.
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The Cognitive Computing Lab's research lies at the intersection of AI (artificial intelligence) and HCC (human-centered computing). Our focus is cognitive computing, with an emphasis on computing and systems issues critical to tackling real-world, large-amounts-of-information, continuous-task, human-in-the-loop problems.
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The Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) lab is located within the School of Interactive at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ELC research focuses on the design of online communities, especially for learning. Whether we are designing and studying systems that are explicitly educational or for business, health, or entertainment purposes, we believe that everyone is always a learner, and educational theory can help us create better systems.
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Foundations for the Future (F3) is a project of the Georgia Tech Research Institute to assist K-12 educators in incorporating technology into the classroom. We provide resources, technical assistance and professional development opportunities to K-12 educators throughout the state of Georgia.
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A fundamental problem in high performance computing is to design high-level, architecture independent, algorithms that execute efficiently on general purpose parallel machines. The purpose of this project is to advance our understanding of the main factors required for designing practical parallel algorithms and to develop techniques and data sets for experimentally validating the results. As a byproduct, we are developing portable parallel programs and data sets for a number of specific important problems arising in combinatorial computing, computational biology and genomics, and image processing.
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The Information Interfaces Group, an HCI research group in the GVU Center at Georgia Tech, develops computing technologies that help people take advantage of information to enrich their lives.
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Researchers at Emory University's Intelligent Information Access Laboratory work on web search, information retrieval, web-scale information extraction and text mining. Ongoing work includes projects in the areas of: (1) large-scale text mining, information extraction, and question answering over the web, scientific literature, and social media; (2) modeling and understanding of user behavior for intelligent web search, question answering, and evaluation.
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The Networking and Telecommunications group conducts cutting-edge research in multiple facets of Networking, with a vision of facilitating tomorrow's innovations in the field of computer communication. We work on diverse topics that range from mobile computing to Internet economics.
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