[agents] Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing AP2PC 09 - deadline extended

[Francesco Guerra]

[Apologies for multiple copies]


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Due to several requests, we are pleased to announce that the paper 
submission deadline has been extended until 16th February 2009.


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CALL FOR PAPERS

Eighth International Workshop on
AGENTS AND PEER TO PEER COMPUTING (AP2PC 2009)

http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/

to be held at AAMAS 2009
Eighth International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Budapest, Hungary
May 10-15, 2009



SCOPE

P2P networking is the term being used to describe a new crop of 
decentralized approaches to self-organize large overlay networks 
where participants can share and exploit enormous autonomous 
resources. At their heart P2P systems embody the earliest principles of the
internet, decentralised systems of similarly enabled 'peers'. What 
makes P2P networking different is that the times have changed; the 
numbers of peers involved has multiplied, their rate of turn-over has 
increased, and they now operate as an overlay within the network
application layer. 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.

The possibilities of this paradigm have generated a lot of interest 
in research, industrial and social networks. P2P network 
collaboration is redefining the way of communicating, publishing, 
doing business and building collective knowledge thanks mainly to the 
advent of free or affordable technologies. For instance, the major 
film studios and the music corporations after realizing the economic 
potential of p2p networks, have started selling their product online. 
Citizen journalism is an example based on P2P interactions, in which 
the idea is that people without professional journalism training can 
use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the 
Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in 
collaboration with others; P2P reputation-based mechanisms are used 
to validate facts/news. P2P lending allows person to skip the bank 
and borrow from individuals; people can borrow from complete 
strangers or just use P2P lending services to structure loans between 
friends and family (e.g. Booper, Zopa, Kiva). Recently projects based 
on P2P architectures, for exchanging and sharing knowledge among 
companies (e.g. NeP4B), have been funded; the companies of any 
nature, size and geographic location will be able to search for 
partners, exchange data, negotiate and collaborate without 
limitations and constraints. For these and other similar phenomena 
has been coined at Harvard Law School the term Commons-based peer 
production to describe a new model of economic production in which 
the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into 
large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical 
organization or financial compensation. The Internet is going to be 
revolutionized by applications able to harness the power of P2P 
networking to bring together communities of people and organizations 
with similar interests or goals, and the agent technology offers the 
potential for developing such systems.

In P2P computing peers and services organise themselves dynamically 
without central coordination in order to foster knowledge sharing and 
collaboration, both in 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 and sensor networks in an attempt to achieve 
even higher ubiquitousness.
The possibility of services related to physical location and the 
relation with agents in physical proximity introduces new 
opportunities and also new technical challenges. The MultiAgent 
community can make substantial contributions with respect to all of 
these issues.

The agent paradigm serves to embody the description of the task 
environments, the decision-support capabilities, the collective 
behavior, and the interaction protocols of peers. Agent research puts 
its emphasis on addressing issues of user autonomy, coordination,
trust, and decision making in the context of activities of other 
agents. P2P systems are now providing infrastructures which are 
sufficiently robust and scalable in order to enable the realization 
and application of agent-based coordination strategies to large-scale 
systems. Research on P2P computing is currently performed in a wide 
range of areas, such as distributed computing, MultiAgent systems, 
databases, computational trust and mobile networks. Although this 
research is based on similar concepts, exchange of ideas among the 
communities is non-trivial, due to the different perspectives, the 
focus on different problems or applications and the huge differences 
in the methodological frameworks and technical approaches being 
applied. To achieve progress by exploiting the work of distinct areas 
these barriers have to be overcome. Thus this workshop is of interest 
to all of the aforementioned communities that see the potential of 
the agent paradigm in P2P computing for several important research 
issues, such as semantic interoperability, trustworthiness, 
negotiation, just to cite only some of them. 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. Moreover for the MultiAgent community the 
workshop opens an opportunity to explore P2P systems as real large 
scale open environments of heterogeneous and autonomous agents in 
which studying, developing and tuning their methodological framework 
and technical solutions having also the possibility to disseminate 
their results to other areas working on P2P infrastructures.

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 original contributions on 
the following non-exhaustive list of topics:

- Intelligent agent techniques for P2P computing
- P2P computing techniques for MultiAgent 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
- Social Networks, Community of interest building, regulation and 
behavioral norms
- P2P Data Mining Agents
- 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 in mobile system, ad-hoc, mesh and sensor networks
- Environments or solutions for bioinformatics based on P2P and Agent paradigms
- Grid computing solutions based on agents and P2P paradigms
- Legal issues and Intellectual property rights in P2P systems
- P2P body sensor networks
- Agents and P2P networks for Ambient Intelligence


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission: 16th February 2009 (extended deadline)
Acceptance notification: 1st March 2009
Workshop: 10-15 May 2009
Springer post-proceedings camera-ready: 30th May 2009



SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION

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.). Papers should be submitted as a pdf file through 
the conference.
management system, at the following url: 
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/AP2PC09/
As in preceding editions accepted papers will be published by Springer
in the Lecture Notes on Computer Science serie  s (LNCS).


REGISTRATION AND ACCOMMODATION

The accommodation and workshop registrations will be handled by the 
AAMAS 2009 organization along with the main conference registration.

(further details are available at http://p2p.ingce.unibo.it/)


dott. ing. Francesco Guerra
Researcher in Computer Engineering, Ph. D.
Dipartimento di Economia Aziendale
Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Phone: +39  059  205 6264 / +39  059  205 6869
Fax:   +39  059  205 6129
Web: www.dbgroup.unimo.it/~guerra
Email: francesco.guerra at unimore.it