Stephanos Androutsellis PhD research plan

   Publications Plan:

• Currently I only focus on thesis write-up. There are no specific goals for other publications.

   Non-thesis-related personal plans:

• Follow SENSE/PENED accounting stuff.
• Follow SOPRANO accounting stuff.
• Follow DIEPTELO accounting stuff.
• Prepare for SOPRANO Bilbao meeting (June 10-12).

   PhD thesis table of contents:

No	Section	Comments	Status	Target
1.	Introduction
1.a.	Overview of my research and motivation (Use Ptrim S1)
1.b.	Main results and original contributions
1.c.	Organisation of thesis
2.	Theory and background
2.a.	Introduction – big picture
2.b.	P2P networks and architectures	Based on ACM survey
2.c.	Distributed transaction processing systems	Compared to centralized, characteristics, requirements (use e-commerce paper)
2.d.	Centralized and distributed reputation management	Survey of current approaches
2.e.	Market-based risk management	Financial derivatives, risk management, market efficiency. Use Ptrim S2.1. S2.4
2.f.	Auxiliary theory and tools used in this research	Mention, with references to Sections, we’ll be talking about crawling utilities, importance sampling, Java/jxta development etc.

• 3. Problem definition and proposed solution
  • a. Definition of problem we want to attack: Managing P2P transaction risk

Includes general and also specific goals

• • b. Limits of research scope

Things that are not our problem ( References to Section 7).

• • c. Proposed solution: A Market based approach

At an abstract level. Use patent literature for ideas.

• • • i. Relation to other approaches

Complementary to reputation management, explain how the two could cooperate.

• • • ii. Abstract description of proposed solution.

Abstract design and architecture. Description of the market-based insurance layer, and the Ptrim system. Use Ptrim S2.3. Talk about need for efficient, competitive market. Use Ptrim S3.1.

• 4. Methodology
  • a. How we chose this particular approach

With particular focus to our evaluation approach. Discuss other possible approaches (e.g. theoretical) that were not selected.

• • b. Description of our overall approach

We’ll build a prototype and test it, and we’ll also run composite experiments and evaluate the results.

• • c. Hypotheses

What were our specific hypotheses (H1, H2, H3). We’ll refer to them in d and e below, and also again in Section 6.

• • d. Prototype system trials

What sort of trials we ran with the prototype. Use Ptrim S4.1. Which hypotheses do we address here.

• • • i. Experimental setup

How the experiment will work, software tool, subjects, questionnaires etc.

• • • ii. Methodology for evaluation

How will we evaluate the results.

• • e. Composite experimental trials

Use Ptrim S4.2. Which hypotheses do we address here.

• • • i. Experimental setup

How the experiment will work, software tool, subjects, questionnaires etc. Use Ptrim S

• • • ii. Transaction data

Where we found the data and what we did with it

• • • iii. Methodology for evaluation

How will we evaluate the results (market efficiency, risk reduction, questionnaires etc)

• 5. Design and implementation

Follows the structure of 3c, but not at an abstract level any more, we refer to design and implementation. Lots of UML diagrams

• • a. Design of Ptrim system
  • b. Ptrim implementation details

How we implemented this: Java, jxta, messaging, etc Use Ptrim S3.2.

• • c. Composite experiment setup

How we implemented this: Perl/CGI/MySQL etc.

• • d. Data crawling

How we did this

• 6. Results, evaluation and discussion
  • a. Evaluation of prototype trial outcomes

Use Ptrim S5.1. Refer to hypotheses

• • b. Evaluation of composite trial outcomes

Use Ptrim S5.2. Refer to hypotheses

• • c. Discussion of overall findings and implications for our approach
• 7. Future work

Mention these also in Section 3.b.

• • a. Security
  • b. Collusion detection
  • c. Insuring insurance transactions
  • d. Further experiments and simulation studies
• 8. Conclusions and synopsis

PhD thesis research plan:

• May 29th 2008: Draft version of PhD skeleton, official initiation of writeup
• June 10th 2008: Completion of additional composite experiment with uniformly sampled data on undergrads. This will be used for the thesis, or for future Ptrim paper versions.
• September 2008: Expected revision of Ptrim journal paper.
• July 10th 2008: First draft of thesis for overview with dds.
• August 25th 2008: Second draft of thesis for overview with dds.
• September 20th 2008: Thesis version ready for review with dds.
• October 15th 2008: Final thesis version ready for submission.
• November 2008: Thesis presentation and PhD completion.