Tomorrow morning, researchers from the University of Southampton and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab will announce the birth of the Web Science Research Initiative.
This new organization will be a joint initiative involving students and faculty from the two universities, and it will focus on research projects that study the impact of the evolution of the web. The World Wide Web Consortium is not heavily involved in the WSRI since it's not a W3C initiative. However, W3C director Tim Berners-Lee and W3C Technology and Society Domain leader Daniel J. Weitzner, who is currently on sabbatical, will serve in advisory roles for a short time until the initiative gets on its feet.
There's no word yet on what the research projects will be or how much funding the WSRI is getting, but there's a press call tomorrow. I will be participating in the call, so I'll have more details on the initiative tomorrow morning.
