Hey /r/webdev .

In a couple weeks I will be overseas in Japan as an exchange student for a year at the University of Electro-Communications. They're primarily a computer science oriented university, and the exchange students in this program are required to do an "in-depth independent research" on a topic/field of our choice. I've looked through the staff directory, and I see a few professors who have their research field listed as "web informatics."

We haven't really been given any details on the specifics of what kind of topics we should be researching, and we'll be given interviews to be paired with a supervising professor and/or lab, and we would be doing our research with them, ending the year with us presenting our research to faculty members. I wanted to get a start on thinking about as many possible areas of research as I can.

I currently intern with a company doing some front-end web design work, and continue in this field once I graduate, so I wanted to see if there were any topics relevant to web development that are worth actual "research." The only computer science topic I can think of is big data with application in social networks.

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks.