The Social and Cognitive Informatics Laboratory (SCILA), established in November 2019, is the successor of the Laboratory for Internet Studies (LINIS) and builds upon its team and some of its previous research. Its founding international supervisor is Prof. Steffen Staab, the head of the Institute of Web Science and Technologies (WeST) as of the time of SCILA establishment.

SCILA’s interdisciplinary team seeks to investigate and model interaction of individual humans and groups with information, knowledge, respective technologies and with other humans using these technologies.  The research strongly relies both on the knowledge from social, behavioral and cognitive sciences and on the cutting-edge approaches from computer science, including machine learning and computational linguistics. As much of information processing happens online, Internet—the previous focus of the Lab’s research—is an integral part of the SCILA’s studies.