Recent years have witnessed the appearance of new paradigms for designing distributed applications where the application components can be relocated dynamically across the hosts of the network. This form of code mobility lays the foundation for a new generation of technologies, architectures, models, and applications in which the location where the code is executed comes under control of the designer, rather than simply as a configuration accident.
Among the various flavors of mobile code, the mobile agent paradigm has become particularly popular. Mobile agents are programs able to determine autonomously their own migration to a different host, and yet retain their code and state (or at least a portion thereof). Thus, distributed computations do not necessarily unfold as a sequence of remote requests and replies between clients and servers, rather they encompass one or more visits of one or more mobile agents to the nodes involved.
Mobile code and mobile agents hold the potential to shape the next generation of technologies and models for distributed computation. The first steps of this process are already evident today: Web applets provide a case for the least sophisticated form of mobile code, Java-based distributed middleware makes increasing use of mobile code, and the first commercial applications using mobile agents are starting to appear.
Nevertheless, the fluid environment defined by mobile code and mobile agents undermines many of the traditional assumptions of distributed computing, and poses novel research challenges that span all the abstraction levels. For instance:
Besides these questions addressing the core research challenges, the research community must also address some pragmatic questions, whose answers will ultimately determine the success (or failure) of this approach:
The ambitious goal of MA 2001 is to gather researchers and practitioners from all over the world and shed some light on the open issues related to this exciting research topic.
The first edition of this conference was held in 1997 in Berlin, and since then it has been, by number of attendees and by quality and breadth of the research disseminated, among the top events for the community of researchers and practitioners interested in mobile code and mobile agents.
In the last two editions, this conference joined the International Symposium on Agent Systems and Applications (ASA) in a single, joint ASA/MA event that aimed at gathering researchers interested in all the flavors of agent system, e.g., including also intelligent and non-mobile agents.
Although these joint events have been very successful, MA 2001 will be presented as a stand-alone event, entirely focused on the original target of mobile code and mobile agents. Our goal with this year's event and those to come, is to strengthen the MA conference as the international venue where the best and latest results in the topics of mobile code and mobile agents are disseminated and discussed.
The Program Committee of MA 2001 seeks research contributions concerning all aspects of research on mobile code and mobile agents. Topics include (but are not limited to):
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Technology: |
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Models & Algorithms: |
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Applications & Experience Reports: |
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Criteria that will drive the selection of papers:
Finally, contributions that bridge the logical mobility of code and agents and the physical mobility of hosts are particular welcome.
Tutorial proposals are sought that present consolidated material focused on specific research topics. Proposals for half-day and full day tutorials are both welcome. Tutorial proposals will be evaluated against their expected impact and usefulness for the attendees of MA 2001. A travel reimbursement up to $1000 will be provided, together with a honorarium of $500 for half-day and $1000 for full-day tutorials.
Title, abstract and brief outline of the proposed tutorials should be sent
via email to the Tutorials Chair, David Wong (wong@merl.com). Submissions could be in either ASCII, Microsoft Word, or PDF format, but possibly not in Postscript.We are accepting proposals for a poster session that will be held during the reception on December 3rd.
Posters and informal research demonstrations provide an opportunity to exhibit late-breaking results and to discuss these results with conference participants in an informal setting. We encourage submissions that are based on new work including work that is in progress. Informal research demos can take place during poster presentation. Presenters need to bring whatever equipment they need for their demonstration; Internet connectivity can be made available upon request.
Proposals should consist of a 1-2 page summary of the work to be presented. If accepted, this summary will be distributed in a bound booklet at the conference and made available for downloading on the conference Web site. You may, if you wish, include a separate page as part of your proposal, to provide additional details about your poster presentation. This page will not be distributed, but will be considered in evaluating your proposal.
Proposals should be submitted to ma2001-posters@cs.dartmouth.edu. PostScript and PDF are the only acceptable submission formats. The poster sub-committee, consisting of Keith Marzullo, Amy Murphy, and Gian Pietro Picco, will evaluate the proposals for their writing quality, technical soundness, research interest, and for their appropriateness for the conference scope.
IMPORTANT DATES:
Poster Proposals Deadline: October 1, 2001
Notification of Poster Acceptance: October 10, 2001
Advanced Registration Deadline: October 28, 2001
The proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes on Computer Science series. A selection of the best papers of the conference will be either published in a special issue of one or more top-quality scientific publications.
Submissions should be at most 15 pages long, single-spaced, in the LNCS style. The document must be in either PostScript or Acrobat PDF format, and must be legible after printing on standard grayscale printers, both those that use A4 and those that use 8-1/2x11" paper.
Submissions will be handled through the online conference management system available at http://ma2001.elet.polimi.it/.
| Paper submissions deadline: | May 14, 2001 (Closed) |
| Tutorial proposals deadline: | June 6, 2001 (Closed) |
| Tutorial notification to authors: | June 20, 2001 |
| Paper notification to authors: | July 2, 2001 |
| Camera-ready final papers due: | September 13, 2001 |
| Poster proposal deadline: | October 1, 2001 |
| MA 2001 Conference: | December 2-4, 2001 |
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