The University of Southampton. Southampton is an excellent venue for conducting cutting-edge research and for providing high quality post-graduate education. It has over 7,500 postgraduates from more than 130 different countries. The University of Southampton is a founding member of the Worldwide Universities Network. Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is an academic Unit within the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, and is internationally regarded for its world-leading and transformative research, and for its ability to define and develop new research directions. ECS has played a leading role in developments in the areas of Web Science and Open and Linked Data. It has driven UK government-level policy decisions that led to the creation of data.gov.uk, has launched the data.ac.uk initiative amongst UK universities, and was instrumental in the creation of the Open Data Institute. The Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group within ECS is a world-leader in Web research and in interdisciplinary methods to study the Web as a socio-technical phenomenon as well as a technological artefact.
The Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group within ECS has a key role in the UK-EPSRC-funded Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Web Science and in the Web Science Trust network of laboratories (WSTnet). It hosts key infrastructure for researchers to engage with the Web Observatory project (webobservatory.soton.ac.uk, webobservatory.org) and Social Machine analytics (sociam.org).