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 AP2PC

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:

1. 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
2. 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

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Karl Aberer, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
M. Brian Blake, Georgetown University, USA
Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, Australia
Ooi Beng Chin, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Paolo Ciancarini, University of Bologna, Italy
Costas Courcoubetis, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Yogesh Deshpande, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Asuman Dogac, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Boi V. Faltings, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA
Chihab Hanachi, University of Toulouse, France 
Mark Klein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany
Yannis Labrou, PowerMarket Inc., USA
Tan Kian Lee, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Dejan Milojicic, Hewlett Packard Labs, USA
Alberto Montresor, University of Bologna, Italy
Luc Moreau, University of Southampton, UK
Jean-Henry Morin, University of Geneve, Switzerland
John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto, Canada
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
Maria Orlowska, University of Queensland, Australia
Aris. M. Ouksel, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Mike Papazoglou, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Terry R. Payne, University of Southampton, UK
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria,
Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College, UK
Dimitris Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
Martin Purvis, University of Otago, New Zealand
Omer F. Rana, Cardiff University, UK
Katia Sycara, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Douglas S. Reeves, North Carolina State University, USA
Thomas Risse, Fraunhofer IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Pierangela Samarati, University of Milan, Italy
Christophe Silbertin-Blanc, University of Toulouse, France
Maarten van Steen, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
Markus Stumptner, University of South Australia, Australia
Peter Triantafillou, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Anand Tripathi, University of Minnesota, USA
Vijay K. Vaishnavi, Georgia State University, USA
Francisco Valverde-Albacete, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Maurizio Vincini, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
Fang Wang, BTexact Technologies, UK
Gerhard Weiss, Technische Universitaet, Germany
Bin Yu, North Carolina State University, USA

PROGRAM AND PAPERS

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

14th July 2003

SPONSORS

We are very grateful to the following generous contributing members:

• Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Rimini
• UNI.TU.RIM S.p.A.
• Microsoft

The first two organizations are important supporting members of the Rimini branch of the University of Bologna.

RELATED EVENTS

Third International Workshop on Global and Peer-to-Peer Computing on Large Scale Distributed Systems organized at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid 2003 

Peer-2-Peer Ecommerce Systems and Applications in Software Technology Track of 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Island of Hawaii (Big Island) January 7-10, 2002

Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2002) Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, September 18 - 20, 2002

International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P2002) Linköpings universitet, 5-7 September 2002

International Peer-to-Peer Systems Workshop (IPTPS02) MIT Faculty Club, Cambridge, MA, USA, 7-8 March 2002 

International Workshop on reliable peer-to-peer distributed systems (RPPDS) In conjunction with 21st IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Osaka, Japan October 13, 2002 

International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Computing co-located with Networking 2002 May 19-24, 2002, CNR Research Area, Pisa, Italy

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