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 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.

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
Tawfik 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, UK
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, UK
Dimitris Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Esmail-Salehi Sangari, Lulea University, Sweden
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, Spainù

PROGRAM AND PAPERS

(documents below are the non-revised versions of the papers presented at the workshop posted here by permission of Springer)

July 15, 2002

08:30-08:45 Welcome

08:45-09:30 Invited talk

Self-Organizing Information Systems
Karl Aberer, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

09:30-10:30 Session 1 - Peer-to-Peer Services

Peer services: from description to invocation
Manuel Oriol, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Execution environment of peer-to-peer services in a mobile environment
Tadashige Iwao*, Makoto Okada*, Kazuya Kawashima^, Satoko Matsumura^, Kanda Hajime^, Susumu Sakamoto^, Tatsuya Kainuma^, Makoto Amamiya° 
*Service Management Laboratory, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Kawasaki, Japan
^2nd Development Division, Fujitsu Prime Soft Technologies Ltd., Nagoya, Japan
°Graduate Schoold of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 Session 2 - Discovery and delivery of trustworthy services

Agent-Based Approach for Trustworthy Service Location
Pýnar Yolum, Munindar P. Singh
Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, USA

Trust-Aware Deliveryof Composite Goods
Zoran Despotovic, Karl Aberer, Department of Communication Systems
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland

Engineering an Agent-Based Peer-To-Peer Resource Discovery System
Andrew Smithson, Luc Moreau
Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:30 Session 3 - Search and cooperation in peer-to-peer agent systems

Modeling and Evaluating Cooperation Strategies in P2P Agent Systems
Loris Penserini* , Lin Liu^, John Mylopoulos^ , Maurizio Panti*, Luca Spalazzi*
*University of Ancona, Computer Science Institute, Ancona, Italy
^University of Toronto, Computer Science Department, Toronto, Canada

A distributed implementation of the SWAN peer-to-peer look-up system using mobile agents
Erwin Bonsma, Cefn Hoile
Intelligent Systems Lab, BTexact Technologies, U.K.

HyperCuP – Hypercubes, Ontologies and Efficient Search on P2P Networks
Mario Schlosser, Michael Sintek, Stefan Decker, Wolfgang Nejdl
Computer Science Department, Stanford University

Messor: Load-Balancing through a Swarm of Autonomous Agents
Alberto Montresor* , Hein Meling^, Ozalp Babaoglu*
*Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Italy
^Department of Telematics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway,

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Panel chaired by Prof. Aris M. Ouksel (University of Illinois, Chicago, USA)

Prof. Karl Aberer (EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, Switzerland)
Prof. Munindar P. Singh (North Carolina State University, USA)
Prof. Paolo Ciancarini (University of Bologna, Italy)
Prof. Sonia Bergamaschi (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

17:30-18:00 Posters

Market Models for P2P Content Distribution
C. Courcoubetis, P. Antoniadis
Department of Informatics Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece

The Resource Management Framework: A System for Managing Metadata in Decentralized Networks Using Peer to Peer Technology
Alan Southall, Steffen Rusitschka
Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Munich, Germany

Using an O-Telos Peer to Provide Reasoning Capabilities in an RDF-based P2P-Environment
Martin Wolpers*, Ingo Brunkhorst*, Wolfgang Nejdl^
*Institute for Information Systems, University of Hannover, Germany
^Computer Science Department, Stanford University

A Mobile Multi-Agent System for Distributed Computing
Stefan Kleijkers, Floris Wiesman, Nico Roos
International Institute of Infonomics, Universiteit Maastricht, 
Department of Computer Science, The Netherlands

Implementation of a Micro Web Server for Peer-to-peer Applications
F. Callegati, R. Gori, P. Presepi, M. Sacchetti
D.E.I.S. - University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy

18:00 Workshop Closing

SPONSORS

• BTexact Technologies, EU Framework V project DIET (Decentralised Information Ecosystem Technologies)
• D2I project of Italian MIUR and the Department of Electronic Computer Science and Systems of the University of Bologna