Web Page: http://www.theuais.org/sws2011/index.htm

2011 3rd Symposium on Web Society

    With the rapid development and wide applications of Internet, more and more people are attracted to be a Web user and spend a lot of time online everyday. For example, there are about 420 million network users in China by the end of July 2010 according to the latest CNNIC report. One year ago, this number was only 338 million. Without question, Web has already created a big virtual world for many people. Although quite different, the World Wide Web still shares many similarities with the real human society and does not exist without participation of human people and organizations. In order to better understand Web society and thus help people use its applications more effectively, it is very necessary to learn more about it. For example, What are the characteristics/personalities of Web users? How do people behave on the Web? How do people search on the Web? Can we identify their intention when they are searching? How can the web behavior and interactions to be understood? And how can we design the Web of the future to ensure that it remains stable and pro-human? All these challenges require the understanding of both human personalities and their behavior on the Web.

    The Web society is a new research field which attracts much attention of not only computer scientists, psychologists, but also social scientists, etc. The aim of this symposium is to bring scholars from different research areas together to explore and discuss the development of Web. We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including computer science, sociology, psychology, economics, health, etc. Papers which incorporate more than one discipline will be particularly welcomed.