W3C is pleased to announce a report from the W3C Workshop on Web and Machine Learning, held online in August and September 2020.

This report contains a brief summary and collects highlights from the individual sessions, and links to the presentation videos. This first-ever virtual W3C workshop kicked off with the publication of 34 talks in August 2020 discussing opportunities and challenges of browser-based machine learning, web platform foundations, as well as developer’s, and user’s perspectives into machine learning technologies in the context of the web platform.

The workshop participants identified as a prime standardization opportunity the low-level primitives for machine learning inference exposed through the Web Neural Network API. This work has been incubated at a W3C Community Group since late 2018. Following the workshop, as a concrete next step, the W3C sent an advance notice of the development of a charter for a Web Machine Learning Working Group to standardize the Web Neural Network API.

The virtual workshop format was well-received and demonstrated the W3C’s ability to adapt to the changing environment that relies on online collaboration technologies in the midst of the global pandemic.

W3C thanks our sponsor, futurice, the Program Committee, and all participants for making this event possible.