Frode Hegland, PhD, is the Director of The Augmented Text Company , a UK-based independent research and software development firm. He serves as Co-Principal Investigator of The Future of Text In Extended Reality project and is the host and publisher of The Future of Text Symposium and its book series.
Behnam Rahdari is a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. He holds a PhD in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh and an MSc from the Polytechnic University of Milan. His research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence, focusing on advancing Human-AI collaboration in search and recommender systems. He has received several academic honors, including the Best Blue Sky Paper Award (ACM Hypertext 2025), Best Demo Award (ACM RecSys 2021), and an Honorable Mention (ACM IUI 2025). He is also a recipient of the Catherine Ofiesh and Gerald Orner Award for academic excellence (2024). His doctoral research systematically investigated carousel-based interfaces, integrating theoretical modeling and empirical studies to examine their influence on user navigation and decision-making in complex domains such as education and health information access.
The 18th edition of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) was successfully held from March 10 to 14, 2025, at the Hannover Congress Centre (HCC), Hannover, Germany. WSDM 2025 was held as an in-person conference. The first day of the five-day event featured tutorials, industry day, and doctoral consortium. The next three days were the main conference days, which consisted of keynote speeches, plenary and poster sessions, and demo sessions. The last day of the event was dedicated to WSDM Cup, WSDM Day, diversity and inclusion sessions, and workshops. This brief report provides an overview of the organization, program details, and statistics from the Program Chairs and General Chairs. Further details are available at https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2025/. At the conclusion of this report, we express our deepest gratitude to the authors, volunteers, steering committee, sponsors, and supporters.
SIGWEB, the ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext and the Web, is a community of scholars, researchers, and professionals who study and use the concepts and technologies of linked information that were originally conceived as hypertext and are most famously realized on the Web. The SIGWEB community's interests range widely and include hypertext in all its forms, social networks, knowledge management, document engineering, digital libraries, and the Web as both an information tool and a social force. SIGWEB encourages innovative research, open discussion of new ideas and the development of methodologies and standards through conferences and a variety of communication resources for its members and the world. In this article, we report on SIGWEB activities and developments in the period July 2024 - July 2025.
The 25th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2025), taking place on September 2–5, 2025, at the University of Nottingham, UK, invites submissions on document-centric research, including AI-driven processing, accessibility, content analysis, and digital preservation. This year's special focus, Document Trust and Security, explores authenticity, integrity, and protection in automated content generation. A new Demonstration Track will showcase practical innovations in document engineering. Researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals are encouraged to contribute. Visit our official website for submission details.
ACM Conference on Hypertext (HT) is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results, systems, and techniques in the broad field of hypertext and social media. The 36th ACM HT conference 2025 will be held in Chicago, Illinois, USA during September 15–19, 2025. It will bring together the major international research groups working on hypertext theory, systems, applications, publishing, artwork, and related practices. In addition, the 2nd INTR/Hypertext Summer School is co-located with the HT 2025 conference, and it will be held on September 13–14, 2025. ACM HT 2025 is a SIGWEB-sponsored conference. The conference proceedings will be published by ACM as part of the ACM Digital Library.
Linda Berube is a visiting lecturer at City St. George's, University of London where she completed her doctoral research. The research was funded through the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's Collaborative Doctoral Programme, in partnership with The British Library and the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCID) at City St George's, University of London. Supervisors were Dr. Ernesto Priego and Dr. Stephann Makri from HCID, and Ian Cooke and Stella Wisdom from the British Library.
The ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (ACM IMX, formerly the International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video) is the foremost international conference for the presentation and discussion of research into online video and TV interaction and user experience. The conference brings together international researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from human-computer interaction, multimedia engineering and design to media studies, VR/AR Technologies, media psychology, and sociology. The program will include technical tracks, industry talks, demos, a doctoral consortium, workshops, and keynote sessions. The venue, UFF's Praia Vermelha campus, in Niterói/Rio de Janeiro offers an ideal setting for fostering collaboration and innovation. IMX '25 invites researchers, industry professionals, and students to contribute and engage in shaping the future of interactive media.
This paper examines how social media's evolution into a major news source has paralleled a rise in misinformation that undermines public trust and disrupts democratic processes and argues for moving beyond one-size-fits-all strategies toward personalized interventions. Leveraging insights from persuasive technologies, we advocate that tailoring misinformation interventions to individual user profiles---accounting for variations in cognitive style, political ideology, and emotional state---can improve effectiveness. Two experimental studies with American participants are presented: the first study demonstrates that flagging false COVID-19--related headlines---with warnings and explanatory text---significantly reduces their perceived accuracy, particularly among users with high neuroticism and deliberative cognitive styles; the second study compares preemptive intervention strategies, revealing that a context-driven, prebunking approach is most effective in enhancing discernment and decision-making confidence, while also mitigating the influence of conspiracy beliefs. The findings contribute to the fields of human-computer interaction and digital misinformation by providing actionable insights into personalized strategies and offering a scalable framework for real-world application.
The ACM Web Science conference (WebSci) is an annual interdisciplinary event exploring the complex relationships between the Web and our society. Through quantitative, qualitative, and computational approaches, Web Science examines research questions at the intersection of social science and computer science. The conference features research that develops and employs cutting-edge methods to study online behavior. WebSci'25 will take place May 21--25 in New Brunswick, NJ, USA hosted by Rutgers University's School of Communication & Information. The main theme of the conference is "Maintaining a Human-Centric Web in the Era of Generative AI ". Proceedings will be published by ACM.
Daniel Roßner is preparing to defend his PhD thesis and serves as a Technical Co-Lead for Identity and Access Management at one of Germany's largest car insurance companies. His research focuses on spatial hypertext and information retrieval, particularly the development of spatial composition algorithms and the relationship between knowledge and spatial proximity.
The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2024) was held in Boise, Idaho, USA, from October 21--25, 2024, marking its return as a fully in-person event after four years of virtual or hybrid formats. With over 900 attendees, CIKM 2024 continued its tradition of bringing together researchers and practitioners in databases, information retrieval, knowledge management, and related fields such as data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The conference featured five paper tracks, attracting 1,496 full research paper submissions and over 1,000 submissions across other categories, with an overall acceptance rate of 26%. The program included 12 tutorials, 10 workshops, three keynote talks, an Industry Day, a PhD Symposium, and an AnalytiCup competition. Keynote speakers addressed emerging challenges in AI, search engines, and outlier detection. The conference also recognized outstanding contributions with best paper awards, the Test of Time Award, and special acknowledgments for senior program committee members and reviewers. CIKM 2024 was made possible through the dedication of the organizing committee and other volunteers, support from industry partners, and sponsorship from SIGIR, SIGWEB, and the USA National Science Foundation, which provided student travel grants.
This article addresses the importance of HaaS (Hadoop-as-a-Service) in cloud technologies, with specific reference to its usefulness in big data mining for environmental computing applications. The term environmental computing refers to computational analysis within environmental science and management, encompassing a myriad of techniques, especially in data mining and machine learning. As is well-known, the classical MapReduce has been adapted within many applications for big data storage and information retrieval. Hadoop based tools such as Hive and Mahout are broadly accessible over the cloud and can be helpful in data warehousing and data mining over big data in various domains. In this article, we explore HaaS technologies, mainly based on Apache's Hive and Mahout for applications in environmental computing, considering publicly available data on the Web. We dwell upon interesting applications such as automated text classification for energy management, recommender systems for ecofriendly products, and decision support in urban planning. We briefly explain the classical paradigms of MapReduce, Hadoop and Hive, further delve into data mining and machine learning over the MapReduce framework, and explore techniques such as Naïve Bayes and Random Forests using Apache Mahout with respect to the targeted applications. Hence, the paradigm of Hadoop-as-a-Service, popularly referred to as HaaS, is emphasized here as per its benefits in a domain-specific context. The studies in environmental computing, as presented in this article, can be useful in other domains as well, considering similar applications. This article can thus be interesting to professionals in web technologies, cloud computing, environmental management, as well as AI and data science in general.
This research investigates how the visibility benefits of the REST architectural style can be pre- served through the use of generalized hypermedia controls without sacrificing user experience in web applications. JavaScript, an implementation of the code-on-demand constraint of REST, has been used to enable rich user experiences on the World Wide Web (WWW) but its use has increasingly become detrimental to visibility in modern web applications. We review the benefits provided by visibility to the WWW and the tension between visibility and code-on-demand. The concept of generalized hypermedia controls is presented and we demonstrate how generalized hypermedia controls preserve visibility while enabling a rich user experience in real-world web applications.
Since April 2022, the Chinese government has mandated the disclosure of domestic users' provincial- level geolocation information on social media platforms in China. This has led to unprecedented, universal accessibility to geolocation information that is automatically tagged to various forms of online content, including short video posts, user comments, and any other forms of user-generated online content. In this paper, we present suggestions and examples that illustrate how this newly available information can potentially change the landscape of social media analysis. First, the universal geolocation disclosure substantially lowers the small sample size and sample selection issues due to voluntary geolocation tagging, thereby ensuring a more comprehensive and general- izable approach to social media analysis. Second, this geolocation data advances the exploration of the relationships between online content and regional characteristics. Researchers can now uncover comparable and less biased regional variations re ected by online content, shedding light on the regional-specific socio-cultural dynamics. This enhanced accuracy of social media analysis provides a new avenue for regional and comparative studies. We also discuss some limitations.
Lesley Frew is a PhD student in the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, under the supervision of Dr. Michele C. Weigle, Professor of Computer Science and Dr. Michael L. Nelson, Eminent Scholar of Computer Science. She received her Master of Science degree in Computer Science at Old Dominion University. Her main research interests are in the area of information-seeking behavior in web archives. Her work on searching for changes in archived webpages won the best student paper award at ACM/IEEE JCDL (2023).
The 33rd edition of The Web Conference was successfully held from May 13 to 17, 2024 at Resorts World Convention Centre, Singapore. It was held as in-person conference that also featured rich virtual elements. The first two days of the five-day event featured workshops, tutorials, special days, and symposia. The last three days were the main conference days dedicated to keynote speeches, parallel presentation sessions of research, industry and special tracks, as well as multiple poster and demo sessions. This brief report provides an overview with organization and program details and statistics from Conference Chairs and Program Committee Chairs. Further details can be found at https://www2024.thewebconf.org/. At the conclusion of this report, we express our deep gratitude to authors, volunteers, SIGWEB, steering committee, sponsors and supporters.
Astrid Ensslin is Professor for the Dynamics of Virtual Communication Spaces at the University of Regensburg. She has been a Director of the Electronic Literature Organization since 2018. Amongst her key roles in the e-lit community have been Co-Director of the Electronic Literature Directory, convener of the ELO Fellows scheme and, since 2019, Principal Editor of the Bloomsbury Electronic Literature book series. She has published 12 books and over 70 peer-reviewed articles on aspects of digital fiction, literary hypertext, literary games and many other topics relevant to the Hypertext community.
The Web is facing unprecedented challenges related to the control and ownership of data. Due to recent privacy and manipulation scandals caused by the increasing centralization of data on the Web into increasingly fewer large data silos, there is a growing demand for the re-decentralization of the Web. Enforced by user-empowering legislature such as GDPR and CCPA, decentralization initiatives such as Solid are being designed that aim to break personal data out of these silos and give back control to the users. While the ability to choose where and how data is stored provides significant value to users, it leads to major technical challenges due to the massive distribution of data across the Web. Since we cannot expect application developers to take up this burden of coping with all the complexities of handling this data distribution, there is a need for a software layer that abstracts away these complexities, and makes this decentralized data feel as being centralized. Concretely, we propose personal query engines to play the role of such an abstraction layer. In this article, we discuss what the requirements are for such a query-based abstraction layer, what the state of the art is in this area, and what future research is required. Even though many challenges remain to achieve a developer-friendly abstraction for interacting with decentralized data on the Web, the pursuit of it is highly valuable for both end-users that want to be in control of their data and its processing and businesses wanting to enable this at a low development cost.
Integrity 2024 is the fifth edition of the Workshop on Integrity in Social Networks and Media, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) since the 2020 edition [1-4]. The goal of the workshop is to bring together academic and industry researchers working on integrity, fairness, trust and safety in social networks to discuss the most pressing risks and cutting-edge technologies to reliably measure and mitigate them. The event consists of invited talks from academic experts and industry leaders as well as peer-reviewed papers and posters through an open call-for-papers.
