AP2PC 2003

 CALL FOR PAPERS
AP2PC 2003
Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-To-Peer Computing
Second International
Workshop on
Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing
(AP2PC
2003)
held in AAMAS 2003
International
Conference on
Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems
Melbourne,
Australia
July 14, 2003
Hotel Sofitel, Auditorium
room
First edition of

CALL FOR PAPERS
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is attracting enormous media
attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as Napster,
Gnutella, and Morpheus. The peers are 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
others. 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.
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 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, and so on. 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 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
ad-hoc networks and pervasive computing based on P2P architectures and
wireless communication devices
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
Abstract:
*16th April 2003* (see submission instructions below)
Paper
submission:
*21st April 2003*
Acceptance
notification: 27th May
2003
Workshop:
14th July 2003
Camera ready
for
post-proceedings:
31st August 2003
REGISTRATION
Accomodation and
workshop registration will be
handled by the AAMAS 2003 organization along with the main conference
registration.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Unpublished papers should be submitted electronically by
e-mailing submission@ingce.unibo.it as
follows:
by 16th April a message specifying in the body the paper's author(s),
title, contact author, at most 5 keywords/topics and the abstract
by 21st April the same message as above by adding in attachment the paper
named as contactauthorsurname.pdf (.ps). Only postscript or PDF
(preferred) formats will be accepted.
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.).
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 vol. no. 2872.
Here is available the
LNCS volume no. 2530 of revised and invited papers of AP2PC'2002
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE