Internet science

Internet science is an interdisciplinary science, which looks at all aspects of the co-evolution in the Internet networks and society and studies it. It works in the intersection of and in the gaps among a wide range of disciplines that have had to respond to the impact of the Internet on their 'home turf' and/or offer specific conceptual or methodological contributions. These include many natural sciences (e.g. complexity science, computer science, engineering, life sciences, mathematics, physics, psychology, statistics, systems and evolutionary biology), social sciences (e.g. anthropology, economics, philosophy, sociology, and political science), humanities (e.g. art, history, linguistics, literature and history) and some existing interdisciplines that cross traditional Faculty boundaries (e.g. technology, medicine, law). Professor Noshir Contractor and others have located it at the intersection of computational social science,network science, network engineering and Web science. By understanding the role of society in shaping Internet networks and being shaped by them Internet science aims to take care of the Internet in a way similar to that in which Web science aims to take care of the Web. The lingua franca in this interdisciplinary area include Internet standards and associated implementation, social processes, Internet infrastructure and policy.

There are a lot of disciplines, which support 'Internet science' using different analysis tools, designs and languages. In order to have a productive and effective dialogue between disciplines, network will have to know the incentives to make cooperation opportunities. There are three main elements of Internet science: Multidisciplinary convergence, Observability and Constructive experimentation.

The European Commission funded a Network of Excellence on Internet Science (project acronym EINS) over the period December 2011-May 2015 under the FP7 funding programme. The Network in May 2015 had 48 member universities and research organisations and 180 individual affiliate researchers. Two major international Internet science conferences were held in April 2013 and May 2015 together with an unconference at the University of Bologna in May 2014 and official workshops at international academic conferences such as Human Behavior and the Evolution of Society and international inter-governmental and multistakeholder conferences such as the 2013 United Nations Internet Governance Forum.

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