The International Conference “Internet and Modern Society” (IMS-2020) was initially planned to take place in St. Petersburg, Russia. Due to the spread of COVID-19 and the ban on public events, the conference was held during 17-20 June 2020 in the format of online sessions with a discussion of papers and presentations uploaded in advance. The conference was organized by the ITMO University during the Information Society Week. The important events of IMS2020, focused on specific aspects of information society and digital transformation, were International Workshop “Information Systems for Science and Education”, International Workshop “Internet Psychology” (IntPsy-2020), International Workshop “Computational Linguistics” (CompLing-2020) and International Workshop «E-Governance2020», as well as Young Scientists Symposium.
Prior to the conference the Program Committee comprising of the recognized researchers from 12 countries had conducted a rigorous peer review, with 32 papers accepted for the publication.
The goal of the International Workshop “Internet Psychology” (IntPsy-2020) was to create a platform for experts and researchers’ collaboration and discussion of the issues related to the transformations of human behavior and communication in the network society, the influence of ICTs on the cognitive and personal development of children and adults, as well as related to the methodology of psychological research on the Internet. The workshop IntPsy 2020 was focused on the following topics: Online Cognition, Digital Socialization, Identity & Self-Presentation Online, Psychology of Gaming & Cybersport, The Use of Immersive and Augmented Reality in Psychology, Problematic & Pathological Online Behavior, Psychology of Social Networking & Mobile Interactions, Big Data in Cyberpsychology Studies, Psychological Aspects of Cybersecurity.
The goal of the E-Governance2020 workshop was to discuss the problems of new forms of interaction between citizens and the state in the digital environment, to develop the idea of digital citizenship, to identify the challenges and risks of digitalization of the public sphere, to determine the role of trust in digital technologies on the part of citizens and public servants. The participants of the workshop discussed the following topics: E-participation, Digital Public Sphere, Digital Citizenship, Trust in Digital Technologies, Participatory Governability, Crowdsourcing, Citizen Sciences in Digital Environment, Big Data, Policy Processes and E-participation.
The goal of the CompLing-2020 workshop was to discuss the actual issues of interaction of linguistics and information technologies – regarding the development of technology solutions on the basis of a natural language, and the influence of information technologies on the language. Target audience are linguists of all profiles, the staff of organizations developing information systems that involve natural language processing, specialists in knowledge representation, higher education teachers, translators. The workshop was focused on the following key topics: Computer modeling of language, Computer analysis of natural language, Corpus linguistics, Digital linguistic resources, Computational and linguistic ontologies, Information extraction, Document analysis, Information retrieval, Machine translation, Computational lexicography, Speech technologies, Linguistic analysis of social networks.
The goal of the International Workshop “Information Systems for Science and Education” was focused on the following topics: e-learning, online education, digital libraries, electronic multimedia collections, and tools for extracting and analyzing contextual knowledge.
The conference traditionally pays great attention to and encourages research by young scientists. The Young Scientists Symposium has brought together researchers who are just starting their scientific careers with recognized scientists whose scientific interests include special aspects of information society and digital transformation. All papers were peer-reviewed in accordance with the general high requirements of IMS 2020 for the quality of work.
The research part of IMS 2020 was structured around paper sessions within four workshops and Young Scientists Symposium giving the floor for presenting the results of studies. Accordingly, the proceedings of IMS 2020 consist of two parts: 1) papers presented within the international workshops; and 2) papers presented within the Young Scientists Symposium.
We would like to thank those who made this event possible and successful. Our gratitude is especially expressed to the Program Committee members for their contribution to the event. We thank the authors for presenting their papers and also the session chairs that led fruitful discussions. We are grateful to all organizers and representatives of institutions, who contributed to the success of this conference; and we are proud to attract a great team of scholars from different countries and disciplines. We will work further to sustain and expand the IMS community through joint research and collaboration. There are the beliefs that the IMS has the good potential to turn into a new important forum for further academic discussion.
We will keep monitoring the evolution of COVID-19. We hope that IMS2021 will take place in St. Petersburg on time and everyone can safely make it through this global issue.