IMPORTANCE Physicians can demonstrate mastery of the knowledge that supports continued clinical competence by passing a maintenance of certification examination (MOCEX). Performance depends on professional learning and development, which may be enhanced by informal routine interactions with colleagues. Some physicians, such as those in solo practice, may have less opportunity for peer interacti...

Peer-to-peer networks can be divided into structured and unstructured based on their overlay topologies. In reality, unstructured p2p networks with superpeers have proved their capacities to support millions of users simultaneously. However, applications deployed on this kind of overlay networks, such as file-sharing, require flooding or gossip-based message routing, which puts more overhead on...

Semi-structured documents formatted with the extensible markup language (XML) are gaining wide use by a whole range of applications including E-Commerce, E-Business, EScience, Digital Libraries (DL), File Sharing, and in the last years especially by applications for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. P2P architectures have been identified as an efficient means of ad-hoc collaboration and information s...

This paper extends previous work by the authors in which they propose a dynamic distribution model based on modified economic growth theory to determine file distribution patterns in peer-to-peer networks. Although the theoretical model provides a good foundation for exploring different pricing mechanisms for peer-to-peer networks, there are several issues that remain unexplored because of comp...

In this paper we present a technique which enables agents to participate in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, such as file-sharing networks. Our technique is founded on the definition of lightweight protocols which specify the interactions required by the agent for a specific P2P network. The protocols that we define are executable specifications and can be directly implemented and independently veri...

Load balancing emerges as an important problem that affects the performance of structured peer-to-peer systems. This paper presents a peer-to-peer system relying on the partitionning of a de Bruijn graph. The proposed system integrates mechanisms that perform index and storage load balancing. Index load refers to the network traffic incurred by a peer in managing an object index, while storage ...

The peer interaction of 26 physically abused children was observed and compared to the peer interaction of normal children (n = 26), neglected children (n = 4) and children referred to a child guidance clinic (n = 21). The children were either enrolled in a day-care intervention program and observed in well-established peer groups or not enrolled in peer-based intervention and observed in newly...

Flooding is a fundamental building block of unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. In this paper, we investigate techniques to improve the performance of flooding. In particular, we present Clustella, a novel semi-structured P2P architecture with bounded peer degree. Clustella decomposes the network into different clusters, allowing peers to quickly find those neighbors which contribute much ...

Peer-to-Peer networks are designed to provide decentralized, fault-tolerant alternatives to traditional client-server architectures. In previous work, the the resilience of structured P2P networks has been evaluated analytically as well as by simulation. In this paper, we discuss the in uence of peer failures on a core component of our cost-optimized hierarchical P2P protocol Chordella. We show...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure, thanks to its scalability, has been used for designing many large-scale distributed systems. Of the two types of P2P infrastructure: unstructured and structured, the latter has received a greater amount of research attention. Security is one of many challenging problems faced by existing systems based on structured P2P. Having trust in such the P2P environment...