Athens.


The post-lunch (mmmh, baklava) session on this first day here at WebSci '09 returns us to the question of trust; the keynote speaker is Jacques Bus, head of the European Commission unit "Trust and Security" within the directorate for the Information Society and Media. He begins by noting that we have moved from a walled fortress to an open metropolis model for digital information; this is a move from securitisation, isolation, walls, and the protection of everything, to trust, agreement, communication, and the protection of goods. In this digital world, there is as yet no adequate identity management for persons and artificial entities; the protection of data is the key.

Athens.


I'm now in the business session of this first day of WebSci '09 - it brings together a variety of Greek business leaders and politicians. The session will be in Greek, but there's a simultaneous interpreting service - we'll see how that turns out. The first speaker is the representative of the Greek Minister for Development, who points to the importance of life-long learning, the decline of distance, and new modes of working which are associated with the move to a digital economy; this is also associated with new forms of e-commerce and electronically mediated cultural activity.

Athens.


The next speaker at WebSci '09 is Kieran O'Hara, who begins by noting the perception of an increase in the activity of extremist groups on the Web, but with very little clear actual evidence supporting that perception. (Extremism is defined here as living in great tension within an embedding society.) How do extreme ideas - for example of a religious kind - spread on the Web?

One approach to this is to view this - with David Hume - as a marketplace of religious ideas, in which the most extreme are the most visible. But against this, Adam Smith suggests that there is also a drive to the centre in the contest of religious ideas, with the aim to attract a larger number of followers. There may be, in fact, a church/sect cycle, and Kieran points to the Mormons as a former sect which has become an established church, while new more extreme splinter groups have also hived off from this church in recent time. Religious moderation means a lower cost of participation for church members, while extremism means higher costs, but also greater cohesion and contribution from the smaller number of committed supporters.

Athens.


Up next at WebSci '09 is Patricia Victor, who begins by noting the growth in recommendation systems, including, for example, the advanced functionality on Amazon and in other e-commerce applications. Some 60% of Netflix users, for example, base their viewing on recommendations, and Netflix has offered a US$10m prize for an algorithm that improves its recommendation system by 10%.

There are two classes of recommendation systems: systems which are content-based and systems which are collaborative filtering-based. The latter focusses on similarities in the rating behaviour of users, and trust-based systems are often based on such algorithms. Epinions offers such a social trust network, and also allows users to evaluate other users by placing them in their network of trust, thereby conferring particular importance on these users' trust ratings. This also alleviates the 'cold start' problem with new users; it provides more reliable and accurate recommendations and leads to a kind of trust propagation through the network.

Athens.


For the first round of paper sessions here at WebSci '09, I've chosen a session on trust and distrust. Having just watched people juggle USB drives for the best part of 15 minutes, we finally start with a presentation by Dave Karpf. His interest is in the Web's impact on collective action for Internet-mediated organisations - and he suggests that the emergent mobile Web wll be of particular importance in this context.

Mobile Web-enabled devices enable new forms of collective action; rating and reputation systems attach track record data to individual participants - when the two meet, this has potentially radical implications for what uses become possible. Reputation in this context refers to complex, context-dependent community assessments; it plays a crucial role in solving collective action problems, and introduces what Axelrod has called a 'Shadow of the Future': they lead people to do well for others as they make visible the contributions of each participant (and introduce possible future repercussions for those who fail to put in). This is visible for example in communities like eBay or Slashdot, which both promote positive and sanction negative contributions through their reputation systems. Even Google's PageRank can be understood as a reputation system: PageRank measures, indirectly, reputation.

Athens.


The first full day here at WebSci '09 begins with a keynote by NIgel Shadbolt, founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). As we're in Athens, he begins by taking the historical approach: he notes that another way to describe Web science is as 'philosophical engineering', which links back ultimately to the founding fathers of philosophy, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Their pure philosophical speculation, indeed, formed the basis not only for modern philosophy, but also for modern science.

Athens.

The second keynote this evening is by Joseph Sifakis, who begins by taking us through a quick tour of the history of informatics - starting with Turing and Gödel in 1936 and moving through information systems, graphic interfaces, the emergence of the Web and the information society, and leading today to the increasing embedding of computing systems into all kinds of technologies. In the future, we'll see further developments in computing power and storage capacities, and this means that computing systems will be literally everywhere. In developed countries, in fact, a person already uses some 250 different processors per day - processors in cars, computing equipment, home entertainment, telecommunication systems, and so on.

Athens.

Tonight I'm at the opening session for WebSci '09, and we're looking forward to a keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, on the twentieth anniversary of his invention of the World Wide Web. The conference itself is going to be opened in the presence of none other than the president of Greece, though, so the place is swarming with Greek police (unsurprisingly, given the continuing low-level unrest in the country). In fact, there's a couple of secret service agents coming through right now, earpiece and all. His Excellency himself is running fashionably late.