WEBSCI

Welcome to Web Science! The ACM Web Science Conference 2017 is the 9th conference of the series (the 7th being sponsored by ACM-SIGWEB), and it is a unique venue where different disciplines are brought together in a creative and critical dialogue with the aim of understanding the Web. It is a very inclusive, interdisciplinary congress that welcomes participation from all fields including art, anthropology, computer and information sciences, communication, economics, humanities, informatics, law, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. In particular, this conference is a unicum in that it has a tradition for contributions that seek to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.

This year we were very pleased to receive 85 long paper submissions, 42 short paper submissions, and 32 extended abstract/poster submissions, totaling 159 candidate contributions. Given the high quality of submission, it has been a hard job to decide which of the contributions to select for the conference. We are grateful for the support of the Program Committee which consisted of 12 senior members and 66 regular members, plus 50 subreviewers for the research track and 23 regular members plus 3 subreviewers for the poster track. All PC members worked hard, producing 478 reviews and 127 meta-reviews; the process generated intense discussions, with more than 220 comments, based on which we could select an interesting, varied, exciting program comprising 30 long,15 short papers and 23 extended abstracts/posters.

The final program for the main track will include sessions touching different, interesting, timely topics, as one can judge from their titles:

• Aggression, controversy, crime

• Groups and individuals, attention, opinion

• Talking, thinking and living online

• Networks: structure, identifiers, search

• Time, space, archives

• Reflecting, thinking, understanding