Arms, William Y. Cornel University III-CXT-Computer Science Research Using the Cornell Web Lab to Study Social and Information Processes on the Web
The project is a collaborative effort between computer scientists and social scientists to advance understanding of the dynamics of the World Wide Web and its impact on science and society. The Web Lab enables social science scholars and others to study issues related to the diffusion of innovation - how new ideas arise and spread across large populations. The proposal addresses fundamental new computing and information science research questions and extends the Web Lab datasets to new levels of depth and complexity so that critical issues of scale can be explored. The project has four goals: (1) to develop large-scale datasets that support wide ranging research about the nature and evolution of the Web, (2) to study human interaction on the Web by combing methods of hypothesis-driven research from the social sciences with large-scale modeling of information structures from computer and information sciences, (3) to understand better how the Web evolves over time by developing models of the creation, modification, and destruction of pages and link structures, and by testing those models on Web-scale snapshots, and (4) to make the datasets available over the TeraGrid.
