[p2p-hackers] Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing (AP2PC 2006) Call for Papers

[Sam Joseph]

PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS/PARTICIPATION

Fifth International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing (AP2PC
2006)
http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/
held at AAMAS 2006
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems
Future University, Hakodate, Japan.
from 8 May - 12 May 2006.


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 resources 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/charter?gtype=rg&group=p2prg).

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. Firstly,
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.
The increasing interest in this research area is evident in that the
four previous editions of AP2PC has been among the most popular AAMAS
workshops in terms of participation. Research in Agents and Peer to Peer
is by its nature interdisciplinary and offers a challenges for several
communities, such as distributed systems, networks and database systems.
We believe that all of these communities have much to contribute in
terms of moving this area forward.

We seek high-quality and original contributions on the general theme of
"Agents and P2P Computing" according to the following 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
- Mobile P2P
- 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


IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract submission: 15th January 2006
Paper submission: 19th January 2006
Acceptance notification: 19th February 2006
Workshop: 9th May 2006
Camera ready for
post-proceedings: 20th July 2006

REGISTRATION
Accomodation and workshop registration will be handled by the AAMAS 2006
organization along with the main conference registration.

PUBLICATION AND 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.). Papers should be submitted as a pdf file through the
Microsoft conference management system at the following url:

https://msrcmt.research.microsoft.com/AP2PC2006/

As in preceding editions, where accepted papers have been published by
Springer in the Lecture Notes on Computer Science series (2002 Vol.
2533, 2003 Vol. 2871, 2004 Vol. 3601, 2005 publication in progress), we
are planning to publish revised versions of accepted papers in the same
Springer series.

We invite authors to compare their contributions with preceding papers
presented at previous AP2PC workshops
(http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/ap2pc/index.html).
In addition, please consider here the evaluation criterion that our
reviewers will be using;
http://www.neurogrid.net/ap2pc2005/review-form.html


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Program Co-chairs

Sonia Bergamaschi,
Dept. of Science Engineering,
University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia,
via Vignolese, 905 - 41100 Modena Italy
Tel. +39 059 2056132 - Fax +39 059 2056126
E-mail: bergamaschi.sonia at unimo.it

Zoran Despotovic (Main Contact)
Future Networking Lab, DoCoMo Communications Laboratories Europe,
Landsberger Str. 312
80687 Munich, Germany
E-mail: despotovic at docomolab-euro.com

Sam Joseph
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

Gianluca Moro
Dept. of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems (DEIS)
University of Bologna
Via Venezia, 52
I-47023 Cesena (FC), Italy
Tel. +39 0547 339237, Fax +39 0547 339208
Email: gmoro at deis.unibo.it


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
Mari'a S. Pe'rez-Herna'ndez, Universidad Polite'cnica de Madrid, Spain
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria,
Jean Marc Pierson, INSA de Lyon, France
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