[p2p-hackers] Agents and P2P Workshop - submission form live

[Sam Joseph]

*** our apologies if you receive multiple copies of this e-mail ***

Call for Papers for the

Fourth International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing
(AP2PC 2005)
http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/
held in AAMAS 2005
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems
Utrecht University, Netherlands.
from 25 July - 29 July 2005.

[SUBMISSION FORM NOW AVAIALBLE]
https://msrcmt.research.microsoft.com/AP2PC2005/CallForPapers.aspx
[see below for more details]

CALL FOR PAPERS: Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has attracted enormous 
media attention, initially spurred by the popularity of file sharing 
systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. More recently systems 
like BitTorrent and eDonkey have continued to sustain that attention. 
New techniques such as distributed hash-tables (DHTs), semantic routing, 
and Plaxton Meshes are being combined with traditional concepts such as 
Hypercubes, Trust Metrics and caching techniques to pool together the 
untapped computing power at the "edges" of the internet. These new 
techniques and possibilities have generated a lot of interest in many 
industrial organizations, and has resulted in the creation of a P2P 
working group on standardization in this area. 
(http://www.irtf.org/charters/p2prg.html).

In P2P computing peers and services forego central coordination and 
dynamically organise themselves to support knowledge sharing and 
collaboration, in both cooperative and non-cooperative environments. The 
success of P2P systems strongly depends on a number of factors. First, 
the ability to ensure equitable distribution of content and services. 
Economic and business models which rely on incentive mechanisms to 
supply contributions to the system are being developed, along with 
methods for controlling the "free riding" issue. Second, the ability to 
enforce provision of trusted services. Reputation based P2P trust 
management models are becoming a focus of the research community as a 
viable solution. The trust models must balance both constraints imposed 
by the environment (e.g. scalability) and the unique properties of trust 
as a social and psychological phenomenon. Recently, we are also 
witnessing a move of the P2P paradigm to embrace mobile computing in an 
attempt to achieve even higher ubiquitousness. The possibility of 
services related to physical location and the relation with agents in 
physical proximity could introduce new opportunities and also new 
technical challenges.

Although researchers working on distributed computing, MultiAgent 
Systems, databases and networks have been using similar concepts for a 
long time, it is only fairly recently that papers motivated by the 
current P2P paradigm have started appearing in high quality conferences 
and workshops. Research in agent systems in particular appears to be 
most relevant because, since their inception, MultiAgent Systems have 
always been thought of as collections of peers.

The MultiAgent paradigm can thus be superimposed on the P2P 
architecture, where agents embody the description of the task 
environments, the decision-support capabilities, the collective 
behavior, and the interaction protocols of each peer. The emphasis in 
this context on decentralization, user autonomy, dynamic growth and 
other advantages of P2P, also leads to significant potential problems. 
Most prominent among these problems are coordination: the ability of an 
agent to make decisions on its own actions in the context of activities 
of other agents, and scalability: the value of the P2P systems lies in 
how well they scale along several dimensions, including complexity, 
heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, and so 
forth. It is important to scale up coordination strategies along 
multiple dimensions to enhance their tractability and viability, and 
thereby to widen potential application domains. These two problems are 
common to many large-scale applications. Without coordination, agents 
may be wasting their efforts, squander resources and fail to achieve 
their objectives in situations requiring collective effort.

This workshop will bring together researchers working on agent systems 
and P2P computing with the intention of strengthening this connection. 
Researchers from other related areas such as distributed systems, 
networks and database systems will also be welcome (and, in our opinion, 
have a lot to contribute). We seek high-quality and original 
contributions on the general theme of "Agents and P2P Computing". The 
following is a non-exhaustive list of topics of special interest:

- Intelligent agent techniques for P2P computing
- P2P computing techniques for MultiAgent Systems
- The Semantic Web, Semantic Coordination Mechanisms and P2P systems
- Scalability, coordination, robustness and adaptability in P2P systems
- Self-organization and emergent behavior in P2P networks
- E-commerce and P2P computing
- Participation and Contract Incentive Mechanisms in P2P Systems
- Computational Models of Trust and Reputation
- Community of interest building and regulation, and behavioral norms
- Intellectual property rights in P2P systems
- P2P architectures
- Scalable Data Structures for P2P systems
- Services in P2P systems (service definition languages, service 
discovery, filtering and composition etc.)
- Knowledge Discovery and P2P Data Mining Agents
- P2P oriented information systems
- Information ecosystems and P2P systems
- Security issues in P2P networks
- Pervasive computing based on P2P architectures (ad-hoc 
networks,wireless communication devices and mobile systems)
- Grid computing solutions based on agents and P2P paradigms
- Legal issues in P2P networks PANEL
The theme of the panel will be Decentralised Trust in P2P and MultiAgent 
Systems. As P2P and MultiAgent systems become larger and more diverse 
the risks of interacting with malicious peers become increasingly 
problematic. The panel will address how computational trust issues can 
be addressed in P2P and MultiAgent systems. The panel will involve short 
presentations by thepanelists followed by a discussion session involving 
the audience.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: 14th March 2005
Acceptance notification: 18th April 2005
Workshop: 25-26th July 2005
Camera ready for post-proceedings: 20th September 2005

REGISTRATION
Accomodation and workshop registration will be handled by the AAMAS 2005 
organization along with the main conference registration.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Previously unpublished papers should be formatted according to the 
LNCS/LNAI author instructions for proceedings and they should not be 
longer than 12 pages (about 5000 words including figures, tables, 
references, etc.).

Please submit your papers through the Microsoft conference management 
system: https://msrcmt.research.microsoft.com/AP2PC2005/CallForPapers.aspx

Particular preference will be given to those papers that build upon the 
contributions of papers presented at previous AP2PC workshops. In 
addition, please carefully consider the issues that our reviewers will 
be considering. Some of the issues our reviewers will be considering can 
be seen in this form:

http://www.neurogrid.net/ap2pc2005/review-form.html

At the very least we would encourage all authors to read the abstracts 
of the papers submitted to previous workshops - available from the links 
below:

http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/2002/  
http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-40109-22-2991818-0,00.html
http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/2003/  
http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-40109-22-37060961-0,00.html
http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/2004/

Particular preference will be given to both novel approaches and those 
papers that build upon the contributions of papers presented at previous 
AP2PC workshops.

PUBLICATION
Accepted papers will be distributed to the workshop participants as 
workshop notes. As in previous years post-proceedings of the revised 
papers (namely accepted papers presented at the workshop) will be 
submitted for publication to Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer 
Science series.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Program Co-chairs

Zoran Despotovic
School of Computer and Communication Sciences, E'cole Polytechnique 
Fe'de'rale de Lausanne (EPFL)
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Email zoran.despotovic at epfl.ch

Sam Joseph (main contact)
Dept. of Information and Computer Science, University of Hawaii at 
Manoa, USA
1680 East-West Road, POST 309, Honolulu, HI 96822
E-mail: srjoseph at hawaii.edu

Claudio Sartori
Dept. of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, University of 
Bologna, Italy
Viale Risorgimento, 2 - 40136 Bologna Italy
E-mail: claudio.sartori at unibo.it

Panel Chair
Omer Rana
School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, UK
Queen's Buildings, Newport Road, Cardiff CF24 3AA, UK
E-mail: o.f.rana at cs.cardiff.ac.uk

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Karl Aberer, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Alessandro Agostini, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
Djamal Benslimane, Universite Claude Bernard, France
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
M. Brian Blake, Georgetown University, USA
Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, Australia
Paolo Ciancarini, University of Bologna, Italy
Costas Courcoubetis, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Yogesh Deshpande, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Asuman Dogac, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Boi V. Faltings, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA
Dina Q. Goldin, University of Connecticut, USA
Chihab Hanachi, University of Toulouse, France
Mark Klein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany
Tan Kian Lee, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, UAE
Wolfgang Mayer, University of South Australia, Australia
Dejan Milojicic, Hewlett Packard Labs, USA
Alberto Montresor, University of Bologna, Italy
Luc Moreau, University of Southampton, UK
Jean-Henry Morin, University of Geneve, Switzerland
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
Maria Orlowska, University of Queensland, Australia
Aris. M. Ouksel, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Mike Papazoglou, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria,
Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College, UK
Dimitris Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
Martin Purvis, University of Otago, New Zealand
Omer F. Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Douglas S. Reeves, North Carolina State University, USA
Thomas Risse, Fraunhofer IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Pierangela Samarati, University of Milan, Italy
Christophe Silbertin-Blanc, University of Toulouse, France
Maarten van Steen, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Katia Sycara, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Peter Triantafillou, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Anand Tripathi, University of Minnesota, USA
Vijay K. Vaishnavi, Georgia State University, USA
Francisco Valverde-Albacete, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Maurizio Vincini, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
Fang Wang, BTexact Technologies, UK
Gerhard Weiss, Technische Universitaet, Germany
Bin Yu, North Carolina State University, USA
Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy