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 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

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

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Karl Aberer, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
Jon Bing, Universitat of Oslo, Norway
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
Dina Q. Goldin, University of Connecticut, USA
Chihab Hanachi, University of Toulouse, France 
Mark Klein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany
Yannis Labrou, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, USA
Tan Kian Lee, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, UAE
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
Giovanni Sartor, CIRSFID, University of Bologna, 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
Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy

PROGRAM

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

19th July 2004

SPONSORS

We are very grateful to the generous contribution of Microsoft

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 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Island of Hawaii (Big Island) January 5-8, 2004 

Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2003) Sonera Conference Center, Helsinki, Finland, August 27 - 29, 2003

International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P2003) Linköpings Universitet, Sweden, 1-3 September 2003

International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS03) Claremont Hotel, Berkeley, CA, USA, 20-21 February 2003 

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

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 
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