Despite its haphazard growth, the Web hides powerful underlying regularities - from the organization of its links to the patterns found in its use by millions of users. Probabilistic modelling allows many of these regularities to be predicted on the basis of theoretical models based on statistical methodology. Among these applications are data mining and bioinformatics. This text has been designed to fill a specific niche and will cover the most important aspects of the Internet at the information level using a modern unified mathematical/probabilistic/graphical models/machine learning treatment. The book will not deal with the physical layer, or the protocol layer of the Internet. Rather it will focus on the information and application layers, as well as some of the emerging properties of the Internet.
