Summary Paper.- What Agents and Peers Have to Offer Each Other: A Partial History of the AP2PC Workshop.- Agent and Peer Trust.- Information Sharing among Autonomous Agents in Referral Networks.- Performance and Testing.- Performance Prediction in Peer-to-Peer MultiAgent Networks.- P2P Agent Platform: Implementation and Testing.- Grid and Distributed Computing.- A Dynamic Pricing and Bidding Strategy for Autonomous Agents in Grids.- Agent-Based Autonomous Result Verification Mechanism in Desktop Grid Systems.- Enabling Grassroots Distributed Computing with CompTorrent.- Location and Search Services.- Design of a Secure and Decentralized Location Service for Agent Platforms.- Flexible Bloom Filters for Searching Textual Objects.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, Morpheus, Kaza, and several others. In P2P systems, a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power and the storage capacity of the hosts composing the network, and because they realize a completely open decentralized environment where everybody can join in autonomously. 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. In particular, research on agent systems appears to be most relevant because multiagent systems have always been thought of as networks of autonomous peers since their inception. Agents, which can be superimposed on the P2P architecture, embody the description of task environments, decision-support capabilities, social behaviors, trust and reputation, and interaction protocols among peers. The emphasis on decentralization, autonomy, ease, and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages also leads to significant potential problems. Most prominent among these 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 in how well they self-organize so as to scale along several dimensions, including complexity, heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, etc. This book brings together an introduction, three invited articles, and revised versions of the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia, July 2003.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2005, held in Utrecht, Netherlands, July 2005, in the context of the 4th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2005. The 13 revised full papers cover trust and reputation, P2P infrastructure, semantic infrastructure, as well as community and mobile applications.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. In P2P systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network, and because they make their underutilized resources available to each other. This book brings together three especially commissioned invited articles, an introduction, and revised versions of the papers presented at the 1st International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2002, held in Bologna, Italy in July 2002. The book is organized into topical sections on peer-to-peer services, discovery and delivery of trustworthy services, and search and cooperation in peer-to-peer agent systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2008, held in Estoril, Portugal, in May 2008 and the 8th International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2009, held in Budapest, Hungary, May 2009, co-located with the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The volume is organized in topical sections on social welfare, distributed information sharing, and network organization and efficiency.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, or peer computing, is a paradigm that is viewed as a potential technology for redesigning distributed architectures and, consequently, distributed processing. Yet the scale and dynamism that characterize P2P systems demand that we reexamine traditional distributed technologies. A paradigm shift that includes self-reorganization, adaptation and resilience is called for. On the other hand, the increased computational power of such networks opens up completely new applications, such as in digital content sharing, scientific computation, gaming, or collaborative work environments. In this book, Vu, Lupu and Ooi present the technical challenges offered by P2P systems, and the means that have been proposed to address them. They provide a thorough and comprehensive review of recent advances on routing and discovery methods; load balancing and replication techniques; security, accountability and anonymity, as well as trust and reputation schemes; programming models and P2P systems and projects. Besides surveying existing methods and systems, they also compare and evaluate some of the more promising schemes. The need for such a book is evident. It provides a single source for practitioners, researchers and students on the state of the art. For practitioners, this book explains best practice, guiding selection of appropriate techniques for each application. For researchers, this book provides a foundation for the development of new and more effective methods. For students, it is an overview of the wide range of advanced techniques for realizing effective P2P systems, and it can easily be used as a text for an advanced course on Peer-to-Peer Computing and Technologies, or as a companion text for courses on various subjects, such as distributed systems, and grid and cluster computing.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. In P2P systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network, and because they make their underutilized resources available to each other. Three especially commissioned invited articles appear in this volume: an introduction, and revised versions of the papers presented at the 1st International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2002, held in Bologna, Italy in July 2002. The book is organized into topical sections on peer-to-peer services, discovery and delivery of trustworthy services, and search and cooperation in peer-to-peer agent systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems, ProMAS 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, May 2006. Coverage includes uncertainty of agents; lightweight devices for business and e-commerce applications; component-based agents for MAS simulation; creation, execution, mobility and communication of agents; as well as multi-agent platforms and organization.

These are the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2003), held at the Sonera Conference Center in H- sinki, Finland, August 27–29, 2003. It was co-located with the 4th Agentcities Information Days. One key challenge of developing advanced agent-based information systems is to balance the autonomy of networked data and knowledge sources with the pot- tial payo? of leveraging them by the appropriate use of intelligent information agents on the Internet. An information agent is a computational software entity thathasaccesstooneormultiple,heterogeneous,anddistributeddataandinf- mation sources; proactively searches for and maintains relevant information on behalfofitshumanusersorotheragents,preferablyjust-in-time. Inotherwords, it is managing and overcoming the di?culties associated with information ov- load in the open and exponentially growing Internet and Web. Depending on the application and tasks at hand information agents may collaborate in open, n- worked data and information environments to provide added value to a variety of applications in di?erent domains. Thus, research and development of inf- mation agents is inherently interdisciplinary: It requires expertise in information retrieval, arti?cial intelligence, database systems, human-computer interaction, and Internet and Web technology. Initiated in 1997, the purpose of the annual international workshop series on cooperativeinformationagents(CIA)istoprovideaninterdisciplinaryforumfor researchers, software developers, and managers to get informed about, present, anddiscussthelatesthigh-qualityresultsinadvancementsoftheoryandpractice in information agent technology for the Internet and Web. Each event of this renowned series attempts to capture the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of this research area by calling for contributions from di?erent research communities, and by promoting open and informative discussions on all related topics.

Starting with Napster and Gnutella, peer-to-peer systems became an integrated part of the Internet fabric attracting millions of users. This book provides an introduction to the field. It draws together prerequisites from various fields, presents techniques and methodologies, and gives an overview on the applications of the peer-to-peer paradigm.