Dear Prof. Menczer,

I am the Director of the Department of Computer Engineering 
("Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica") of the University 
of Palermo. First of all let me apologize for the responsibilities 
that my Department had in the plagiarism episodes reported in your 
website http://homer.informatics.indiana.edu/~nan/6S/plagiarism/ 
and in the letter you sent on 30/10/2007 to the Dean of the Faculty.

In consideration of the information reported on the web page, 
I immediately started an internal investigation, together with the former 
Director, to establish facts and responsibilities of Department members. 
The Dean of the Faculty was regularly kept up-to-date about the 
investigation activities.

The internal investigation has been fast and careful. We heard all of 
the persons involved in the plagiarism episodes. Dr. Alfonso Urso, 
prof. Giuseppe Lo Re and prof. Salvatore Gaglio sent us explanatory letters. 
Dr. Luca Gatani sent us a letter in which he takes full responsibilities 
for the plagiarism episodes.

According to this internal investigation the following facts result:

-       Several episodes of plagiarism occurred in the papers reported 
in the attached list and published by members of Dipartimento di Ingegneria 
Informatica. The ideas described in the papers have been plagiarized, and 
in the less recent papers many sentences, paragraphs and figures have been 
reported without quotes, citations and acknowledgements. However, the 
more recent papers also show many other autonomous developments.
-       The unpublished work: "Filippo Menczer, Ruj Akavipat and 
Le-Shin Wu: 6S: Distributing crawling and searching across Web peers"
downloaded from the website of your Department: 
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/research/publications/6S.pdf 
has been recognized as the lightly main source of plagiarism.
-       Dr. Luca Gatani asserted to be the only responsible for the 
plagiarism episodes. In facts, he always claimed as his own the ideas, 
the algorithms, the methodologies plagiarized from the previously cited work.
-       Dr. Gatani kept on hiding the existence of the original source 
to the other coauthors. Also after the letters from prof. Shen, he admitted 
to have only copied without quotes some sentences from your papers and 
to have erroneously written a wrong reference.
-       During the investigation process, Dr. Luca Gatani resigned from his 
Post-Doctorate position at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica.
-       The Department Chair will firmly ensure that all of the offending 
papers will be removed from the curricula of all of the authors and all 
possible actions will be taken in order to have them removed from all of 
the digital libraries where they have been published. These papers cannot 
be used for any purposes as grant requests, position calls and so on.
-       The Department Chair will urge the Dean of the Faculty and the 
Rector of the University of Palermo to appoint an international ad hoc 
committee also composed by the President of IEEE and the President of ACM 
or their delegates, in order to preserve the scientific reputation of the 
University of Palermo.

Let me express my regret for the professional damages that have been 
caused by the plagiarism episodes and my hope to bring this entire matter 
to a satisfactory closure for all the parties involved.


Regards,


Prof. Antonio Chella
Director of Department


LIST OF PAPERS

1.    Luca Gatani, Giuseppe Lo Re and Salvatore Gaglio. An Adaptive Routing Mechanism for Efficient Resource Discovery in Unstructured P2P Networks. Proc. International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (ICCSA 2005), Part III. Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol 3482/2005, p. 39-48. Springer. ISSN 0302-9743 (Print) 1611-3349 (Online), 2005.
2.    Luca Gatani, Giuseppe Lo Re, Alfonso Urso and Salvatore Gaglio. Reinforcement Learning for P2P Searching. Proc. 7th International Workshop on Computer Architecture for Machine Perception (CAMP'05), pp. 303-308. ISBN: 0-7695-2255-6, 2005.
3.    Luca Gatani, Giuseppe Lo Re and Salvatore Gaglio, An Adaptive Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Peer-to-Peer Networks. Proc. 6th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM'05), pp. 44-50. ISBN: 0-7695-2342-0, 2005.
4.    Luca Gatani, Giuseppe Lo Re and Salvatore Gaglio. An adaptive routing mechanism for P2P resource discovery. Proc. 5th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'05), Volume 1, pp. 205-212. ISBN:0-7803-9074-1, 2005.
5.    Luca Gatani, Giuseppe Lo Re and L. Noto. Efficient Query Routing in Peer-to-Peer Networks. Proc. 3rd IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Research and Education (ITRE'05), June 27-30, 2005, Hsinchu, Taiwan, pp. 393-397. ISBN: 0-7803-8932-8
6.    Luca Gatani, Giuseppe Lo Re. An Efficient Adaptive Strategy for Searching in Peer-to-Peer Networks. Multiagent and Grid Systems 1 (3): 209-224, 2005. IOS Press, Amsterdam. ISSN:1574-1702
7.    E. Ardizzone, L. Gatani, M. La Cascia, G. Lo Re, and M. Ortolani. Enhanced P2P Services Providing Multimedia Content. Proc. of the Eight IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, 2006. ISM'06. pp. 637-646 ISBN: 0-7695-2746-9
8.    E. Ardizzone, L. Gatani, M. La Cascia, G. Lo Re, and M. Ortolani. A P2P Architecture for Multimedia Content Retrieval. In LNCS Advances in Multimedia Modeling Volume 4351/2006 pp. 462-474 ISBN 978-3-540-69421-2
9.    E. Ardizzone, L. Gatani, M. La Cascia, G. Lo Re, and M. Ortolani. Enhanced P2P Services Providing Multimedia Content. Advances in Multimedia, vol. 2007, Article ID 26070, 12 pages, 2007.
10. E. Ardizzone, L. Gatani, M. La Cascia, G. Lo Re, and M. Ortolani. Distributed Multimedia Digital Libraries on Peer-to-Peer Networks. In: Proc of The 14th Intl Conference on Image Analysis and Processing. 2007. (pp. 77-82).
11. Luca Gatani,  Alessandra De Paola, Giuseppe Lo Re, and Salvatore Gaglio. An Adaptive Routing Mechanism for P2P Resource Discovery. In Journal of Grid Computing. Springer Netherlands. ISSN 1570-7873 (Print) 1572-9814 (Online), 2007.