AP2PC 2004

 CALL FOR PAPERS
AP2PC 2004
Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-To-Peer Computing
Third International
Workshop on
Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing
(AP2PC 2004)
to be held at AAMAS
2004
Third International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and
Multi Agent Systems
New
York City, USA
July 19-20, 2004
Columbia University
CALL FOR PAPERS
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is attracting enormous media attention, spurred by

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 which have already launched important projects.
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, MultiAgent 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, MultiAgent Systems have always been thought of
as networks 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, 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
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 P2P. P2P computing has had
some visible successes in applications such as file sharing, but many of these
applications have had a consumer or hobbyist focus. This panel will discuss
emerging "mission-critical" applications of P2P and the challenges
that P2P technologies must surmount in order to best support such applications.
These challenges include security, trust and reputation, representing business
protocols, checking compliance, bootstrapping systems, and performance.
The panel will involve short presentations by four panelists
followed by a discussion session involving the audience.
IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract:
1st
April 2004 (see submission instructions below)
Paper submission:
6th April
2004
Acceptance notification:
1st May 2004
Workshop:
19th or 20th July 2004
Camera ready for
post-proceedings:
31st August 2004
REGISTRATION
Accomodation and
workshop registration will be
handled by the AAMAS 2004 organization along with the main conference registration.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
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.).
The abstract and then the paper should be submitted electronically here
http://www.neurogrid.net/ap2pc2004/submit
according to the deadlines mentioned above.
In case of problems submit abstract and paper (PS or pdf preferred), according to the deadlines mentioned above, to
submission@ingce.unibo.it
by specifying in both emails:
paper's author(s), title, contact author and at
most 5 keywords/topics.
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 (LNCS)
Here are the volumes of revised and invited papers of preceding editions:
LNCS volume no. 2530 for AP2PC'2002
LNCS volume no. 2872 for AP2PC'2003
LNCS volume no. 3601 for AP2PC'2004
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE