To Prof. Domenico Saccˆ Director of ICAR-CNR c.c. Prof. Francesco Beltrame Head of the ICT department of CNR Prof. Filippo Menczer Dr. Ruj Akavipat Dr. Le-Shin Wu Dear Director, I am writing to you concerning the episodes described in the WEB page . First of all I want to express my deep regret for what happened and for the professional damages that have been caused to the offended authors. At the same time I would like to state full particulars about my role in this matter. I was told that Dr. Luca Gatani - Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Palermo when facts occurred - wrote a letter to the Director of "Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Universitˆ degli Studi di Palermo" taking upon himself the full responsibility for what has happened. Anyway, I would like to make the following remarks regarding my position: (1) I am coauthor of only one [1] of the six offending papers; this fact is not at all clear in the WEB page, where it seems that I am coauthor of all the six papers; (2) in the research activity regarding the offending papers, my role was secondary as proved by the fact that I am not coauthor of any others of them; (3) my contribution in the cited paper was limited to the reinforcement learning issues introduced in that article; these issues have not been considered involved in the plagiarism by the offended authors themselves; (4) in the revision of the paper, the draft proposed by Dr. Gatani, first author of the article, did not report the citation of the only paper published by the offended authors till that moment [2]. For this reason it was very difficult to realize the possible plagiarism. So, my only responsibility was my trust in the work of the young coauthor. Moreover I was not the tutor of Dr. Gatani and I had no responsibility for his activity as Ph.D. student. Once again I want to express my regret for what happened. I also want to state that I was informed about the episode only some days ago by the mentioned WEB page and I was never involved in the explanation e-mails among my coauthors, the offended authors, Prof. Shen and Dr. Mandelbaum during the last almost two years. I am very sorry and upset for this because I couldnÕt give my explanation earlier; but at the same time I think that if I wasnÕt involved in the explanation e-mails itÕs because my role and good faith are already clear and it is evident that I have nothing to do with the plagiarism. On the basis of the above remarks, I hope that the responsibility of the episode is clarified and that Prof. Menczer can modify the WEB page (http://homer.informatics.indiana.edu/~nan/6S/plagiarism/) that, in my opinion, contains expressions that damage my reputation as well as the good name of my institution. Sincerely yours Alfonso Urso [1] Reinforcement Learning for P2P Searching. Proc. 7th International Workshop on Computer Architecture for Machine Perception (CAMP'05), pp. 303-308. [2] Small World Networks in Distributed Web Search. Poster Proc. WWW 2004. -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Ing. Alfonso Maurizio Urso - Ricercatore Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto di CAlcolo e Reti ad alte prestazioni (ICAR-CNR) viale delle Scienze - edificio 11 - 90128 Palermo - Italy ---------------------------------------------------------