[p2p-hackers] Final CFP: Agents and P2P Computing (AP2PC 2005)

Tue Mar 8 02:05:09 UTC 2005

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FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
AGENTS AND P2P COMPUTING (AP2PC 2005)
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Fourth International Workshop on
Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing (AP2PC 2005) http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/

to be held at AAMAS 2005 http://www.aamas2005.nl/
Fourth International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems

Utrecht, Netherlands
July 25-29, 2005
Utrecht University

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 multi-agent 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 the panelists followed by a discussion session involving the audience.

IMPORTANT DATES

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

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Unpublished papers should be formatted according to the LNCS/LNAI http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html 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:

Sample Reviewers 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 in the following section.

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be distributed to the workshop participants as workshop notes. Post-proceedings of the revised papers (namely accepted papers presented at the workshop) will be published by Springer - Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/fcp2003.html#jul)
Here are the volumes of revised and invited papers of preceding editions:
LNCS volume no. 2530 http:/www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-40109-22-2991818-0,00.html for AP2PC'2002 http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/2002/
LNCS volume no. 2872 http:/www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-40109-22-37060961-0,00.html for AP2PC'2003 http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/2003/

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

ORGANIZERS

Program Co-chairs  Zoran Despotovic
School of Computer and Communication Sciences, 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

STEERING COMMITTEE

Karl Aberer, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Sonia Bergamaschi, Dept. of Science Engineering, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
Manolis Koubarakis, Dept. of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete
Paul Marrow, Intelligent Systems Laboratory, BTexact Technologies, UK
Gianluca Moro, Dept. of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, Univ. of Bologna, Cesena, Italy
Aris M. Ouksel, Dept. of Information and Decision Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Claudio Sartori, CNR-CSITE, University of Bologna,  Italy
Munindar P. Singh, Dept. of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, USA

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
Willem Jonker, Philips, Netherlands
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
Heng Tao SHEN, ITEE, UQ, Australia
Christophe Silbertin-Blanc, University of Toulouse, France
Maarten van Steen, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Katia Sycara, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Heng Tao, University of Queensland, Australia
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