Call for Papers

IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue on Self-Management through
Self-Organization in Information Systems

Submissions due 2 September 2005

Given the scale and complexity of today's information systems, it's
becoming increasingly important that they're able to deal with most of
the problems and tasks of systems management themselves, intelligently
and autonomously. Errors and failures must be worked around, and
configuration should be adaptively optimized responding to the actual
state of the system itself or its environment, with minimal or no
human intervention. The motivations are that self-management allows for
significant cost reduction and increased robustness and that sometimes
it's simply inevitable because human management isn't possible owing to
time or location constraints. Bringing self-management about in a wide
variety of systems such as wired or wireless networks, peer-to-peer
systems, and the computational Grid, and in distributed systems and
applications in general, is an exciting, quickly growing research area.

One popular approach is based on the observation that we're
surrounded by self-organizing systems that successfully solve
self-management. Multicellular organisms, social insects,
ecosystems, and so on are made of components that obey some local
rules and act on the basis of local observations, yet the system as
a whole shows nice properties such as self-healing, self-tuning, and
self-organization---exactly the properties we're after. Distilling the
key ideas from these systems and incorporating them into information
systems could lead to cheap, straightforward, and highly robust
solutions. However, self-organization isn't a panacea.

This special issue seeks contributions that help us better understand
both the advantages and drawbacks of self-organization in information
systems. Submissions discussing realistic applications and comparing
them
with alternative state-of-the-art techniques are especially welcome, but
practically relevant theoretical papers will also be considered.
Examples
for complex information systems and self-organizing approaches include,
but aren't limited to,

*       the Internet;
*       peer-to-peer systems and overlay networks;
*       the Grid;
*       distributed databases and file systems;
*       distributed OSs and middleware;
*       wireless, sensor, and mobile ad hoc networks;
*       biology-inspired methods;
*       sociology-inspired methods;
*       game theory;
*       multiagent-based approaches; and
*       other fully distributed, decentralized approaches.

Special Issue Guest Editors

*       Mark Jelasity, Universita di Bologna, [log in to unmask]
*       Ozalp Babaoglu, Universita di Bologna, [log in to unmask]
*       Robert Laddaga, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
        [log in to unmask]

Important Dates

*       Submissions due for review: 2 Sept. 2005
*       Final decision letter sent: 9 Nov. 2005
*       Final version submitted: 11 Nov. 2005

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be 3,000 to 7,500 words (counting
a standard figure or table as 200 words) and should
follow the magazine's style and presentation guidelines (see
http://computer.org/intelligent/author.htm). References should be
limited
to 10 citations.

To submit a manuscript for peer-reviewed consideration, please access
the IEEE Computer Society Web-based system, Manuscript Central, at
http://cs-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com/index.html.

_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Nigel Gilbert,  Editor, Journal of Artificial Societies and
      Social Simulation, <http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/>
         Centre for Research on Social Simulation (CRESS)
    Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
        Tel:+44 1483 689173   [log in to unmask]
                        <http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/>