SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES
The recent advances in networking have witnessed an increasing use of information technology to support distributed cooperative applications. Several novel applications have emerged in this area, such as computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), large scale distributed virtual world, collaborative recommender systems, collaborative learning systems.

The definition of these applications requires addressing several challenges, like the development of new user interfaces, of coordination protocols, and of proper middleware and architectures supporting distributed cooperation.

P2P architectures are a suitable model for these kinds of applications. As a matter of fact, collaboration is intrinsically peer-to-peer since human interaction is such that the members of a team typically interact with each other, without the need of an intermediary, for example a server.

Collaborative applications may greatly benefit also from the support of cloud based architectures. As a matter of fact, with the emergence of readily available cloud platforms, collaborative applications developers have the opportunity of deploying their applications in the cloud, or by exploiting a hybrid P2P/Server-Client architectures with dynamically adapting cloud support. This brings interesting possibilities to smaller developers that were reserved for the big companies until recently. Furthermore, the integration of mobile/Cloud platforms for collaborative applications is another challenge for the widespread of these applications.

This track aims to provide a venue for researchers to present and discuss important aspects of P2P/Cloud collaborative applications and of the platforms that support these applications. The track's aim is to investigate open challenges for such applications, related to both the applications design and to the definition of proper architectures. Some important challenges are, for instance, collaborative protocols design, latency reduction/hiding techniques for guaranteeing real time constraints, large-scale processing of user information, privacy and security issues, state consistency/persistence.

The track will present assessment of the current state of the art as well as introduce further directions.

The P2PCS Special Session topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

· Large Scale Distributed Virtual Environments
· Distributed Computer Supported Collaborative Work
· Distributed Recommender Systems
· Distributed Collaborative Learning
· Distributed Collaborative Games
· Exploiting Cloud Elasticity for Collaborative Applications
· P2P Collaboration Infrastructures
· Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications
· P2P Overlays for Collaborative Applications
· P2P Collaborative Editing Systems
· P2P System for Distributed Wiki Applications
· Adaptive Protocols for Collaborative P2P Networks
· Hybrid P2P/Cloud Architectures
· Consistency/Persistence Issues
· Massive-scale State and User Data Processing
· Security and Privacy
· Integration of Mobile/Cloud Platforms for Collaborative Applications
· P2P Collaborative Systems in Wireless Environments
· Multi-platform Collaborative Applications Support (phones, tablets, laptop, ...)
· Multi-attribute Resources