AP2PC 2008: Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing - Call for papers

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Seventh International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing (AP2PC 2008)
http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/
held at AAMAS 2008
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems
Estoril, Portugal.
12 May - 16 May 2008.


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission: 8th February 2008
Acceptance notification: 25th February 2008
Workshop: 12-13th May 2008
Camera ready for  Springer LNCS  post-proceedings: 30th May 2008


SCOPE

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
- 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


PANEL

The theme of the panel will be Conducting Business via the P2P paradigm. P2P
computing has had some visible successes in applications such as file sharing
and many of these applications have had a consumer or hobbyist focus, however
worldwide applications based partially on P2P approaches are emerging as a
viable solution to achieve scalability, autonomy and interoperability on large
scale environments. This panel will discuss emerging  business applications of
P2P and the challenges that P2P technologies and autonomous agents must
surmount in order to best support such applications. These challenges include
security, trust and reputation, semantic search and interoperability,
representing business protocols, checking compliance, bootstrapping systems,
and performance. The panel will involve short presentations by experts in the
field, both from the academia and industrial environments, followed by a
discussion session involving the audience.

Panel chair:
Sonia Bergamaschi, full professor at the Dept. of Science Engineering, Univ. of
Modena and Reggio-Emilia
E-mail: bergamaschi.sonia@unimo.it.


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission: 8th February 2008
Acceptance notification: 25th February 2008
Workshop: 12-13th May 2008
Camera ready for Springer LNCS post-proceedings: 30th May  2008


REGISTRATION

Accomodation and workshop registration will be handled by the AAMAS 2008
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.).

Papers should be submitted as a pdf file through the conference management
system, at the following url:
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/AP2PC2008


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 published by  Springer in
Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

We invite authors to check the review form our reviewers will be considering:

http://www.neurogrid.net/ap2pc2007/review-form.html


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Program Co-chairs

Zoran Despotovic
Future Networking Lab,
DoCoMo Communications Laboratories Europe,
Landsberger Str. 312
80687 Munich, Germany
E-mail: despotovic@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@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@deis.unibo.it

Adrian Perreau de Pinninck (main contact)
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA)
Spanish National Research Center (CSIC)
Campus de la UAB, Bellaterra, Spain
Tel. +34 93 580 9570, Fax +34 93 580 9661
Email: adrianp@iiia.csic.es


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Karl Aberer, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Alessandro Agostini, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
Makoto Amamiya, Kyushu University, Japan
Djamal Benslimane, Universite Claude Bernard, France
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
M. Brian Blake, Georgetown University, USA
Costas Courcoubetis, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Alfredo Cuzzocrea, University of Calabria, Italy
Vasilios Darlagiannis, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Zoran Despotovic, DoCoMo Communications Laboratory, Germany
Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA
Francesco Guerra, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
Chihab Hanachi, University of Toulouse, France
Sam Joseph, University of Hawaii, USA
Frank Kamperman, Philips Research, The Netherlands
Tan Kian Lee, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Birgitta Ko"nig-Ries, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, UAE
Alberto Montresor, University of Bologna, Italy
Gianluca Moro, University of Bologna, Italy
Jean-Henry Morin, Korea University, South Korea
Elth Ogston, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
Thanasis Papaioannou, Athens University of Economics & Business, Greece
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria,
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
Claudio Sartori, University of Bologna, Italy
Heng Tao Shen, University of Queensland, Australia
Francisco Valverde-Albacete, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Maurizio Vincini, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
Fang Wang, British Telecom Group, UK
Steven Willmott, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain
Bin Yu, North Carolina State University, USA






----------------------------------------------
Research Associate, Ph. D.
Dept. Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica (DEIS)
University of Bologna
Via Venezia, 52, I-47023 Cesena (FC)
Tel. +39 0547339237 - Fax. +39 0547339208
e-mail: gmoro@deis.unibo.it
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Received on Wednesday, 23 January 2008 04:16:31 UTC