MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRS

Welcome to Athens! On behalf of the organizing team, we wholeheartedly welcome you to the third installment of Valuetools, Valuetools 2008. The first two installments took place in Pisa (2006) and Nantes (2007). So, again, the conference is taking place in a city of rich cultural heritage. We look forward to emulating the previous two installments also in terms of their scientific success.

The motivation behind Valuetools is the observation that an impressive range of methodologies and tools have been developed recently for the purpose of performance evaluation, across many disparate research fields. Valuetools is meant to be a forum that will allow researchers to compare and debate the full range of these tools and methodologies, and in addition promote the interdisciplinary flow of technical information.

The technical program consists of a main event, held on three consecutive days (Tuesday Oct. 21 to Thursday Oct. 23), together with 4 adjunct workshops, held on Monday, Oct. 20 and Friday, Oct. 24.

In this year’s main event, we received approximately 90 submissions, and after a quick rejection of papers obviously out of the scope of the conference, 75 underwent a very thorough review phase that consisted of three reviews or more (particularly in the case of borderline papers). In the end, 30 high-quality papers were accepted. We would like to thank the TPC members for devoting their time and energy. Their contribution was critical for the success of the conference.

In addition to regular papers, we have inserted in the program 4 sessions of invited papers, on areas of research that are currently particularly active. Two of these sessions are in stochastic models in Queueing (organized by Joseph Klafter and Aleksander Veron), one session (organized by Rami Atar and Adam Schwartz) focuses on asymptotic methods in Queueing, and one session (organized by Nachum Shimkin) is on Markov Decision Processes. We would like to thank the organizers of the sessions and the invited speakers for their participation. Invited sessions are a novelty in Valuetools, and we are very excited about their contribution to the success of the conference.

Moreover, we have secured plenary talks by no less than 4 very distinguished speakers, that will help significantly in making this year’s installment a rich experience: Prof. Mairesse, of the Université Paris Diderot, Paris 7, will discuss “Random walks on algebraic structures and discrete event systems”. Prof. Aris Moustakas, of the University of Athens, will discusss the application of statistical mechanics tools in communications research. Prof. Avishai Mandelbaum, of the Technion, will give a talk on "QED Queues: Quality- and Efficiency-Driven Call Centers”, and Prof. Tsitsiklis will discuss “Gossiping, Herding, Flocking, and Consensus”. We are very grateful for the participation of such distinguished speakers, and we are looking forward to their talks.

The workshops deal with more focused research areas within the scope of Valuetools:

• GameComm 2008 (chaired by Tansu Alpcan, Nahum Shimkin, and Laura Wynter) is focused on the intersection of Game Theory and Communications,
• SMCTools (chaired by Konstantin Avrachenkov and Jacques Resing) is on structured Markov chains,
• Inter-Perf (chaired by Giovanni Neglia and Vasileios Pappas) highlights interdisciplinary systems approaches to performance evaluation, and
• WNS2 (chaired by Nicolas Montavant, Michele Rossi, and Lloyd Wood) focuses on NS-2.

We are grateful to the chairs of the various workshops for their significant efforts, and also the overall workshops chairs, Claudio Cicconetti and Sara Alouf for the coordination of this part of the conference.

A selected set of 11 papers among those accepted to the main event and all workshops papers have been invited for submission as full journal publications in the Performance Evaluation Journal and the Journal on Discrete Event Dynamic Systems. We would like to thank their respective Editors-in-Chief, Philippe Nain and XiRen Cao, for gracefully accepting our request to invite these papers to their journals.

In addition, a small ad hoc committee has been formed to decide on a best paper award and a best student paper award. We would like to thank the members of this committee, John Baras, Tijani Chahed, Claudio Cicconetti, Costas Courcoubetis, and Daniele Miorandi for their efforts. Their verdict will be announced shortly before the conference starts.

Finally, we would like to welcome our sponsors, the Athens University of Economics and Business, Institut TELECOM and TELECOM & Management SudParis. Their sponsorship allowed the partial financing of the travel and registration expenses of numerous students, and for this we are grateful. We would like to thank ACM, for agreeing to act as technical sponsor. Finally, we would also like to thank the ICST stuff, and in particular Dorothy Bany, for efficiently handling the infinite amount of logistics that this conference requires.

We believe that the technical program is very strong this year, and the experience of the participants will be most rewarding. We are looking forward to seeing you in Athens

John Baras (General Chair)
Costas Courcoubetis (Vice General Chair)
Tijani Chahed, Stavros Toumpis, Uri Yechiali (TPC co-chairs)