Introduction

Peer-to-peer technologies have become a key component for building large scale distributed systems. This seminar will take a closer look at peer-to-peer systems, discuss their general properties, and the impact of the peer-to-peer principle on practical applications.

Structure of the Seminar

The language of the seminar is English.

To pass the seminar, you need to do the following four tasks:

1. Write a paper about a topic agreed during the first meetings,
2. Review two papers written by other students,
3. Prepare a presentation and discuss it with the other students, and
4. Participate in the seminar by asking questions, raising discussions on the topic, and reviewing other students' work.

During Period I all students write their papers in English. The length of the paper is 7-10 pages formatted according to the IEEE Transactions guidelines. The oral presentations during Period II last about 30 minutes to leave time for questions and discussion.

IEEE guidelines for the paper (Latex and Word) can be found from the IEEE Transaction author guide: http://www.ieee.org/pubs/authors.html

A good book to writing understandable English is The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. It is a classic book. Although it was originally published in 1918, most, if not all, of its content is still valid.

Topics

Anything related to peer-to-peer systems is acceptable as a topic. The following list gives some suggestions.

• What is Peer-to-Peer?
• Distributed hash tables: Introduction
• Distributed hash tables: Performance and practice
• Searching in unstructured systems
• Peer-to-peer content distribution
• Peer-to-peer streaming
• Security in peer-to-peer systems
• Replication in peer-to-peer systems
• Mobile peer-to-peer systems
• Anonymity in peer-to-peer systems

You can find guidelines for writing from the Tieteellinen Kirjoittaminen/ Scientific Writing course page.

Further help is also available from the Writing Center of UW Madison. It contains useful information about how to quote and cite work of others. The center's main web page contains general information about different kinds of citation styles. We are using the IEEE Transactions style which has its own citation style defined in the templates.

Schedule

The seminar is divided into two phases. During the first phase (Period I), students write their papers, with guidance from Jussi if needed. The presentations take place during the second phase (Period II), we will have two presentations from the students each week.

The topics will be assigned during the first meeting.

The preliminary schedule is as follows: (dates and assignments subject to change before the start of the seminar)

Reviews

Everybody has to review two papers written by other students. Each review has a public ja private part. There will be one seminar session about how to do reviews, as mentioned in the schedule. [Review Guidelines] page gives more information about what to write in your review.

The deadline for the review is 8.3. If you have not yet received the paper, the deadline will be assigned when you receive the paper. A nice paper explaining the review process of a journal. You can use it as a hint when doing your own review.

Grading

Students will be graded based on i) their written paper (40%), ii) their oral presentation (40%), and iii) their activity in commenting other students' work and participating in the discussion (20%). To pass the course, the student must write the paper on the agreed subject and present his work. In addition, each student is required to attend at least 80% of the seminar presentations.

Prerequisites

All participants must have a bachelor's degree or have passed the Scientific Writing course. Background in basic networking is required.