AP2PC 2005

 CALL FOR PAPERS
AP2PC 2005
Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-To-Peer Computing
Fourth
International Workshop on
Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing
(AP2PC 2005)
to
be held at AAMAS 2005
Fourth International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems
Utrecht, Netherlands
July 25-29, 2005
Utrecht University
CALL FOR PAPERS
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

CALL FOR PAPERS
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 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 Decentralised Trust in P2P and
MultiAgent Systems. As P2P and MultiAgent systems become larger and more diverse
the risks of interacting with malicious peers become increasingly problematic.
The panel will address how computational trust issues can be addressed in P2P
and MultiAgent systems. The panel will involve short presentations by the panelists
followed by a discussion session involving the audience.
IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract:
8th March 2005 (see submission
instructions below)
Paper submission:
14th March 2005
Acceptance notification:
18th April 2005
Workshop:
25th or 26th July 2005
Camera ready for
post-proceedings:
20th September 2005
REGISTRATION
Accomodation
and workshop registration
will be handled by the AAMAS 2005 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.).
Please submit your papers through the Microsoft conference management system:
https://msrcmt.research.microsoft.com/AP2PC2005/CallForPapers.aspx
Particular preference will be given to those papers that build
upon the contributions of papers presented at previous AP2PC workshops. In addition,
please carefully consider the issues that our reviewers will be considering.
Some of the issues our reviewers will be considering can be seen in this form:
Sample
Reviewers form
At the very least we would encourage all authors to read the
abstracts of the papers submitted to previous workshops - available from the
links in the following section.
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. TBA for AP2PC'2004 (publication in progress)
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE