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International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing
(AP2PC 2002)
http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/
held at the AAMAS 2002 venue (International Conference
on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems)
Bologna, Italy
July 15-16, 2002
IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper submission deadline: 17 April 2002
Acceptance notification: 13 May 2002
Camera ready version: 27 May 2002
It is planned to publish a selection of revised full papers in the Springer
LNCS/LNAI series as post-proceedings publication.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous media
attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as
Napster, Gnutella and Morpheus. The peers are simply autonomous, or as some
call them, first-class citizens. P2P networks are emerging as a new
distributed computing paradigm for their potential to harness the computing
power of the hosts composing the network and make their under-utilized
resources available to each other. This possibility has generated a lot of
interest in many industrial organizations recently, and has resulted in the
creation of a P2P working group for undertaking standardization activities
in this area (http://www.peer-to-peerwg.org/).
In P2P systems, peer and web services in the role of resources become shared
and combined to enable new capabilities greater than the sum of the parts.
This means that services can be developed and treated as pools of methods
that can be composed dynamically. The decentralized nature of P2P computing
makes it also ideal for economic environments that foster knowledge sharing
and collaboration as well as cooperative and non-cooperative behaviors in
sharing resources. Business models are being developed, which rely on
incentive mechanisms to supply contributions to the system and methods for
controlling free riding. Clearly, the growth and the management of P2P
networks must be regulated to ensure adequate compensation of content and/or
service providers. At the same time, there is also a need to ensure
equitable distribution of content and services.
The academic community has been rather slow in reacting to the P2P wave.
Although researchers working on distributed computing, multi-agent systems,
databases and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it
is only 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, multi-agent systems have always been thought of as networks of
equal peers.
The multi-agent 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, ease and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages, 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, etc. It is important to scale up coordination
strategies along multiple dimensions to enhance their tractability and
viability, and thereby to widen the 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 key 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 topic 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 systems
* 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
* Information ecosystems and P2P systems
PANEL
The goal of the panel is to explore the promise of P2P to offer exciting new
possibilities in distributed information processing. The realization of this
promise lies fundamentally in the availability of enhanced services such as
structured ways for classifying and registering shared information,
verification and certification of information, content distributed schemes
and quality of content, security features, and market mechanisms to allow
cooperative and noncooperative information exchanges. The P2P paradigm lends
to examine these issues from the perspective of autonomous and heterogeneous
agents endowed with clearly specified and differential capabilities to
negotiate, bargain and coordinate the information exchanges in a large scale
networks. The impact of this new paradigm on large (business or otherwise)
organizations and on smaller organizations and social communities will be
discussed.
IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper submission deadline: 17 April 2002
Acceptance notification: 13 May 2002
Camera ready version: 27 May 2002
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Unpublished papers should be submitted electronically by e-mailing
[EMAIL PROTECTED] specifying in the message body the paper's
author(s), title, contact author and at most 5 keywords/topics.
Submitted papers should be formatted according to the LNCS author
instructions for proceedings (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
) and they should not be longer than 12 pages (about 5000 words including
figures, tables, references, etc.). Only postscript or PDF formats will be
accepted. The papers should be attached to the e-mail and named as: contact
author surname_.ps (.pdf).
Accepted papers will be available to the workshop participants as workshop
notes. It is planned to publish a selection of revised full papers in the
Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (or in LNAI) as post-proceedings
publication.
Note:
The workshop participants are required to register for the AAMAS 2002 main
conference. Workshop registration will be handled by the AAMAS 2002
Committee along with the main conference registration.
ORGANIZERS:
Manolis Koubarakis
Department of Electronic
and Computer Engineering
Technical University of Crete
University Campus-Kounoupidiana
73100 Chania, Crete GREECE
Tel: +30 8210 37222
Fax: +30 8210 37202
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.ced.tuc.gr/~manolis
Gianluca Moro
Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems
University of Bologna, Italy
Via Rasi e Spinelli, 176
I-47023 Cesena (FC)
Tel. +39 0547 6145 60 or 11
Fax. +39 0547 6145 17 or 50
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
STEERING COMMITTEE:
Paul Marrow, Intelligent Systems Laboratory, BTexact Technologies
Aris M. Ouksel (Panel Chair), University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Claudio Sartori, CNR-CSITE, University of Bologna, Italy
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Karl Aberer, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
Vassilis Christophides, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
Paolo Ciancarini, University of Bologna, Italy
Costas Courcoubetis, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Tewfik Jelassi, ENPC, Paris, France
Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany
Yannis Labrou, PowerMarket Inc., USA
Rolf van Lengen, DFKI, Germany
Dejan Milojicic, Hewlett Packard Labs, USA
Luc Moreau, University of Southampton, USA
Jean-Henry Morin, University of Geneve, Switzerland
John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto, Canada
Christos Nikolau, University of Crete, Greece
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
Mike Papazoglou, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College, United Kingdom
Dimitris Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Esmail-Salehi Sangari, Lulea University, Sweden
Peter Scheuermann, Northwestern University, USA
Dan Suciu, University of Washington, USA
Katia Sycara, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Thomas Tesch, GMD, Darmstadt, Germany
Peter Triantafillou, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Francisco Valverde-Albacete, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
