Workshop Co-chairs

 

Sean Collins                        Milan Vojnovic
University of Bristol, UK           Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
e.j.collins@bris.ac.uk               milanv@microsoft.com

 

Message from the Chairs

Welcome to the beautiful and historic city of Pisa and welcome to the Inter-Perf workshop on interdisciplinary systems approaches to performance evaluation and the design of computer and communication systems. The workshop is co-located with VALUETOOLS, the first international conference on performance evaluation methodologies and tools.

Issues of particular interest in application scenarios for communication models often relate to networks that are large scale in terms computing elements and users, or closely coupled to the spatial environment of their deployment. The aim of Inter-Perf was to exploit the similarity of many such network models, such as ad-hoc networks, mobile networks, sensor networks, and peer to peer networks, with systems found in other sciences. We are delighted to have succeeded in our objective of bringing together contributions which derive insights and techniques from approaches that are standard in areas such as biological systems, physics and the social sciences, where issues of scalability, self-organization and robustness also arise.

The workshop features two superb keynote talks. Laurent Massoulie addresses the stability of decentralized control mechanisms for systems that aim at proportional fair allocation of network resources and broadcasting systems for peer-to-peer data dissemination. Stavros Toumpis draws on mathematical techniques more commonly associated with various branches of physics such as optics and electrostatics to address scalability through the optimization of a macroscopic network model.

The invited talk from Jochen Mundinger provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in handling reputation in the various computer science communities as well as the social sciences, and looks at the impact of liars on their peers' reputation, while the invited talk from Mathilde Durvy takes up the theme of self-organization, focussing on the benefits of non-slotted protocols on spatial reuse in multi-hop wireless networks.

In addition, there is a stimulating programme of contributed talks, with topics including: information dissemination systems, analogies to thermal diffusion, defense against Internet worms, optimal networks and Braess' paradox, non-linear compartmental systems, and congestion control based on population competition models.

We would like to thank our technical committee members and an external reviewer for their commitment and the work that they contributed in reviewing the submitted papers. We have taken the review process seriously so that each submitted paper has received at least three reviews, all but one from the technical committee members or workshop co-chairs. 

We would also like to record our appreciation for the benefits of technical cooperation with Create-Net/ICST and the EU (IST-FET), and gratefully acknowledge the support of our corporate sponsor, Microsoft Research and additional funding from BIONETS.

Finally we would like to thank the people who have helped make this workshop a success, including the members of the VALUETOOLS organizing committee, and especially the speakers for their invaluable contributions. We hope you all enjoy participating in the workshop and wish you a wonderful time in Pisa.

Sean Collins & Milan Vojnovic

Inter-Perf Co-chairs