AP2PC 2002

 CALL FOR PAPERS
AP2PC 2002
Agents and Peer-To-Peer Computing
International Workshop on
Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing
(AP2PC 2002)
held in conjunction with AAMAS
2002
International Conference on
Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems
Bologna,
Italy
July 15, 2002
(Room 2.3 in the Main
building of the Engineering Faculty)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous
media attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing

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 non cooperative information exchanges. The P2P paradigm
lends itself 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: 29 April 2002
Acceptance notification: 17 May 2002
Camera ready version: 30 May 2002
REGISTRATION
Workshop
registration will be handled by the AAMAS 2002 Committee along
with the main conference registration.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Unpublished papers should be submitted
electronically by e-mailing submission@ingce.unibo.it
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/LNAI author instructions for proceedings 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).
PUBLICATION
Accepted papers will be distributed to the
workshop participants as workshop notes. Post-proceedings of the revised full papers
will be published in the forthcoming vol. no. 2530 of Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
series. Non-revised versions of the papers presented at the workshop are available
by permission of Springer.