orchestrating services. SOC lets developers dynamically grow application portfolios more quickly than ever before by• creating compound solutions that use internal organizational software assets, including enterprise information and legacy systems, and • combining these solutions with external components possibly residing in remote networks.The visionary promise of SOC is that it will be possible to easily assemble application components into a loosely coupled network of services that can create dynamic business processes and agile applications that span organizations and computing platforms.3 Such services will go well beyond simply exchanging information-the dominating mechanism for application integration today-to accessing, programming, and integrating application services encapsulated within old and new applications.Key to realizing this vision is the service-oriented architecture. SOA is a logical way of designing a software system to provide services either to end-user Service-oriented computing promotes the idea of assembling application components into a network of services that can be loosely coupled to create flexible, dynamic business processes and agile applications that span organizations and computing platforms. An SOC research road map provides a context for exploring ongoing research activities.

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new computing paradigm that utilizes services as the basic constructs to support the development of rapid, low-cost and easy composition of distributed applications even in heterogeneous environments. The promise of Service-Oriented Computing is a world of cooperating services where application components are assembled with little effort into a network of services that can be loosely coupled to create flexible dynamic business processes and agile applications that may span organizations and computing platforms. The subject of Service-Oriented Computing is vast and enormously complex, spanning many concepts and technologies that find their origins in diverse disciplines that are woven together in an intricate manner. In addition, there is a need to merge technology with an understanding of business processes and organizational structures, a combination of recognizing an enterprise's pain points and the potential solutions that can be applied to correct them. The material in research spans an immense and diverse spectrum of literature, in origin and in character. As a result research activities are very fragmented. This necessitates that a broader vision and perspective be established — one that permeates and transforms the fundamental requirements of complex applications that require the use of the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm. This paper provides a Service Oriented Computing Roadmap and places on-going research activities and projects in the broader context of this roadmap. This research roadmap launches four pivotal, inherently related, research themes to Service-Oriented Computing: service foundations, service composition, service management and monitoring and service-oriented engineering.

Autonomous AI systems need complex computational techniques for planning and performing actions. Planning and acting require significant deliberation because an intelligent system must coordinate and integrate these activities in order to act effectively in the real world. This book presents a comprehensive paradigm of planning and acting using the most recent and advanced automated-planning techniques. It explains the computational deliberation capabilities that allow an actor, whether physical or virtual, to reason about its actions, choose them, organize them purposefully, and act deliberately to achieve an objective. Useful for students, practitioners, and researchers, this book covers state-of-the-art planning techniques, acting techniques, and their integration which will allow readers to design intelligent systems that are able to act effectively in the real world.

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We examined the hypothesis that senescence represents a proximate mechanism by which the kidney is damaged in type 2 diabetic nephropathy (DN). As a first step, we studied whether the senescence-associated ␤-galactosidase (SA-␤-Gal) and the cell cycle inhibitor p16INK4A are induced in renal biopsies from patients with type 2 DN. SA-␤-Gal staining was approximately threefold higher (P Ͻ 0.05) than in controls in the tubular compartment of diabetic kidneys and correlated directly with body mass index and blood glucose. P16INK4A expression was significantly increased in tubules (P Ͻ 0.005) and in podocytes (P ϭ 0.04). Nuclear p16 INK4A in glomeruli was associated with proteinuria (P Ͻ 0.002), while tubular p16INK4A was directly associated with body mass index, LDL cholesterol, and HbA1c (P Ͻ 0.001-0.05). In a parallel set of experiments, proximal tubule cells passaged under high glucose presented a limited life span and an approximately twofold increase in SA-␤-Gal and p16INK4A protein. Mean telomere lengths decreased ϳ20% as an effect of replicative senescence. In addition, mean telomere decreased further by ϳ30% in cells cultivated under high glucose. Our results show that the kidney with type 2 diabetic nephropathy displays an accelerated senescent phenotype in defined renal cell types, mainly tubule cells and, to a lesser extent, podocytes. A similar senescent pattern was observed when proximal tubule cell cultures where incubated under highglucose media. These changes are associated with shortening tubular telomere length in vitro. These findings indicate that diabetes may boost common pathways involving kidney cell senescence, thus reinforcing the role of the metabolic syndrome on biological aging of tissues. tubular cells; telomeres; p16 INK4A ; senescence-associated ␤-galactosidase AGING has been proposed to represent the failure or success of tumor-suppressor mechanisms that depend on the activities of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p16INK4A and of telomere shortening (2). It has been theorized that the high frequency of end-stage renal disease in the elderly results from an interaction between somatic cell senescence and age-associated diseases, such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes mellitus, which could hinder the limited ability of aged kidney to repair and maintain epithelial functions (24, 25). Cell senescence is characterized by an irreversible growth arrest and functional and morphological changes (2), including enhanced expression of senescence markers, such as senescence-associated ␤-galactosidase (SA-␤-Gal), and different sets of genes, including negative regulators of the cell cycle (2, 17, 18). In vitro studies support the hypothesis that diabetes may accelerate cell and organ senescence in humans. Hyperglycemia induces premature replicative senescence in human skin fibroblasts, an effect that is tightly coupled to larger cell volume in skin fibroblasts from patients with diabetic nephropathy (3, 21). In addition, a role of hyperglycemia in kidney cell senescence has been observed in ...