Insights from the design and creation towards Advances within Optical active materials
A.Guillermo Bracamonte et al. Editions
About the Cover In Progress. Commentary focusing light on the control of the Nanoscale and beyond:
It is noted the importance of the Nanoarchitecture and materials use to develop tiny Nanoarchitectures formed by varied compositions to develop Nano-Optics. Therefore, the Nano-Optical signaling could afford to act by different mechanism to transfer and coupling varied energy modes towards a wide view of photonics applications. In this context it is added the interest of Research and developments of new designs of Optical active devices and miniaturized Instrumentation. By this manner it is linked phenomena occurring in the molecular, Quantum, and Nano-regimes towards the Micro-, and Macro-scales where it is required measurable, accurate, and high precision signaling resolution.
In this brief communication it is intended to highlight why it is important the prototyping of Nanomaterials in the design and synthesis of new Nanomaterials. In this regard it is higlgihted the methodology to afford new designs nominated as “Prototyping”. Incorporate the concept of prototyping of macromaterials in absence of developing reactions and wet chemistry is possible by the use of macroscopic materials that could be handled by hands. Therefore, the design using real materials in the macroscale with shapes that emulate the Nanoscale, and contemplating chemical surfaces is possible. Sometimes the use of the blackboard and 3D imaging softwares could provide interesting approaches; however the capability to manipulate real materials emulating the molecular and Nano-world is of high impact in the design of new Nanomaterials. The prototyping could facilitate different strategies using varied materials to support the idea in the Nanoscale. Then, after obtained the design and developed the synthetic methodology could be applied the iteration and optimization depending of results obtained.
In these perspectives is noted the important theme of Nano-Optics that could be developed in order to study and design Optical active Nanomaterials, light matter interactions, quantum phenomena and Metamaterials as well. In this context, it is important to note that from this point of view, the Prototyping is related as well with the methodology to develop the know-how to create a new Nanomaterial with particular new non-classical Optical properties. It involucres the design of the idea based on physical and chemical phenomena. Thus, it should be incorporated many strategies from different sources of materials and associated properties. Thus, the knowledge about Nanochemistry is required for the bottom up of the Nanoplatforms. Spectroscopy of materials as well should be considered in order to produce smart Optical active matter. This is the theory, and sometimes is not as straight as expected. In this context, it could be presented many challenges in this theme where prototyping is a very important step in the design and synthesis of the Nano-Optical material. By this manner it is possible to think in the potential performances as well as any inconvenient, interferences, etc. in the process of the fabrication. Hence, these concepts focused on how to proceed, it could be expected to develop Nano-optics from the desk to the bench and laboratory. In these perspectives, it was leaded to highlight some recent reports in literature showing varied approaches and strategies depending of the involved study or targeted application. Hence, Prototyping Nanomaterials is a basic step in the design, synthesis and fabrication of Optical active single Nanoplatforms and Nano-, Microarrays, it was noted that the concept is related with the proposal of the targeted design based on well-known molecular and Nanocomponents joined none previously achieved before for a desired functionality of study.[i] In this manner Innovation could be proposed as challenges as well. The same concept is developed when different materials are combined with unknown properties looking for the study of some property none well known or a new one. This last mention is because not always are known all the properties of materials. In many cases they were recently synthesized and partial characterization was developed. In this context, the prototyping of Optical active Nanomaterials by the combination of different matter compositions is an interesting fundamental Research field as well as an applied field and required for the fabrication of new Optical materials within varied scale of lengths.[ii] The prototype is the first proposed model of design of the Nanomaterial. This should be logically well justified based on knowledge and hypothesis of functionality. It could be related with inventions as well as fabrication processes, or both at the same time. As all prototype it should be developed from an idea to a simple scheme, theorical model, calculation, physical model fabricated maybe in the macroscale to show the Nanoarchitecture permitting by this manner the visualization of the different components and functions.[iii] All these strategies can provide different manners of evaluation of the fundaments or basis involved in the targeted final properties of desired proposed study.[iv],[v] Thus, when it is mentioned the targeted property or function[vi],[vii] , it is focused on the objective of the Research work or fabrication process.[viii], [ix] So, it is opened by this manner the call of ideas and communications related; as well as new ones non discussed in this brief letter.
References
[i] C. Selin, P. Boradkar, Prototyping Nanotechnology: A transdiciplinary approach to responsible innovation, J. of Nano Education, 2, 1-2 (2010) 1.12.
[ii] A. Guillermo Bracamonte, Design and Synthesis of Hybrids Graphene based Metamaterials, Editorial Letter of Special Issue: Design and Synthesis of Graphene based Metamaterials, Current Material Science (CMS)-Recent Patents on Materials Science, Bentham Sci. Pub., 15, 3 (2022) 203-203.
[iii] A.Guillermo Bracamonte et al., Editorial Letter: Insights in the generation of fundamental Research within Nanophotonics towards design of miniaturized devices, Bentham Editorial Insights., Word Press, Bentham Science (Dec. 11), 1 (2022) 1-3 (from CMS ISSN: 2666-1462, OnLine) https://benthamsciencepublishers.wordpress.com/
[iv] A.Guillermo Bracamonte et al., Editorial Letter 1, 1 (2023): The Nanochemistry from basis to design and prototyping new Nanomaterials, Bentham Editorial Insights., Word Press, Bentham Science (Feb. 5) (2023) 1-2 (from CMS ISSN: 2666-1462, OnLine) https://benthamsciencepublishers.wordpress.com/
[v] A. Guillermo Bracamonte Guest Editor*, Versatile surface chemistry of Carbon based Nanoplatforms by covalent bonding, non-covalent linking, crosslinking, and self-assembling”, Recent Progress in Materials, Special issue: Hybrid Graphene-based Materials: Synthesis, Characterization, Properties, and Applications, LIDSEN Publishing Inc., Open Access Publisher, 5, 4 (2023) 1-22. (https://www.lidsen.com/journals/rpm/rpm-05-04-034)
[vi] Invited 2023-2024 Editor in Frontiers in Chemistry, Special section in Analytical Chemistry, to lead Special Topic entitled: “Tuning Enhanced signaling from Optical active Nanoplatforms for Biophotonics and Bio-analytical applications”; with Co-Editors Prof. Eduardo Coronado (Argentine and USA), Rodrigo Iglesias (Argentine and USA), Raquel Galian (Spain, and Argentine), and Shaima Elyamny (Egypt, and Spain). “Electronic ISSN 2296-2646 (Proposal of leaded Topic submitted and Accepted by April, and Published by Oct. 6th, 2023) (2023-2024) (Switzerland; and London, UK) https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/chemistry
[vii] Invited 2024 Guest Editor of “Materials, MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)”. Open Access Publisher (Switzerland). ISSN: 1996-1944. With Co-Editor Prof. Marcelo Romero at UNC Argentine for the Special Issue entitled:“Advances in Research on Graphene and Related Materials: From Preparation and tuning properties to Applications” (Proposal Special Issue Accepted by October 2023, Publication In progress) (2024) https://www.mdpi.com/journal/materials/about
[ix] Luna R. Gomez Palacios, A. G. Bracamonte*, Development of Nano-, Microdevices for the next generation of Biotechnology, Wearables and miniaturized Instrumentation, RSC Adv., 12 (2022) 12806–12822 (DOI https://doi.org/10.1039/D2RA02008D).
National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA
In this issue of the journal, we inaugurate a new series entitled “Milestones”. This series will encompass interviews with some of the pioneers that have laid the foundations of HIV research. Revisiting these landmarks while taking into account the prospect of their founders should be an inspiration to our readers, particularly the youngest generation. Nobody better than Dr. Robert Gallo could be the protagonist of the inaugural “Milestone”, with his recount of the discovery of HIV-1, the causative agent of AIDS, and the development of the first blood test to diagnose HIV-1 infection.
Robert C. Gallo is the discoverer of the first human retrovirus, HTLV-1, and the co-discoverer of HIV-1. Among his many seminal contributions are also the discovery of IL-2 and the development of the HIV blood test, which has helped save millions of lives worldwide. He has received innumerable prizes and awards, including two Lasker Prizes. He is the co-founder and director of the Institute of Human Virology (IHV) in Baltimore and the co-founder and scientific director of the Global Virus Network (GVN). He was the most cited scientist in the world between 1980 to 1990.
Dr. Gallo: Thank you so much for accepting to talk with us about your discovery that started the entire field of HIV research, which is the namesake of our journal. Last year, we commemorated the 40th anniversary of the publication of a short report in the CDC MMWR bulletin, describing a few cases of atypical pneumonia in homosexual men in Los Angeles. What were your thoughts when you first heard about this new disease? Did you immediately think that the causative agent could be a retrovirus? Honestly, I did not pay much attention to it. It could have been just a cluster of uncommon infections like many others that remain totally inconsequential. And no, I did not immediately think the underlying cause could be a retrovirus until I started to really think about it.
But then, at some point, the new disease did catch your attention. How did it happen? One day in early 1982, Jim Curran from the CDC came to the NIH to give a lecture on the epidemiology of these unusual infections and presented a clear picture of the risk groups: they were the same as for HTLV-1. This is when I started to really think it could be a retrovirus. It was a sunny day. After his lecture, we walked back together toward Bldg. 37, and he told me: “The epidemiologists have done their job. But where are the virologists?” That was a turning point for me. In the following months, clinicians started to send us patient samples from different cities and we started to culture their T cells in search of an HTLV-1-related retrovirus. The first experiment in our lab books is dated May 1982.
Was the idea of a human retrovirus well accepted at that time? Now it seems to be common sense, but back then, the idea that AIDS could be caused by a retrovirus was very controversial. Not to me, of course, after the discovery of HTLV-I and -II. To me, it was pretty clear that this was not an acute respiratory virus or an acute virus at all. When a virus is dripping off your tongue, the cause of the disease is obvious. But this was a hidden virus, a mysterious agent of a mysterious disease, and there were all kinds of theories on what the cause could be, including certain behaviors or drugs. Plus, the patients had so many other microbes replicating in their bodies that it was really hard to pinpoint the one that could be the cause of the disease. I had long discussions with my good friend Max Essex. We were reasoning that it had to be something new and that it was likely transmitted through biologic fluids like blood, or sex and motherto-child transmission, which we had already seen previously with HTLV-I and HTLV-II. Also, there was a high prevalence in Haiti where HTLV-I was also prevalent. So, the retrovirus idea became predominant in my mind, and the tropism for CD4 T cells strengthened that idea.
How important was the role of the clinicians in the discovery of HIV? The clinicians, like Leibowitch and Willy Rozenbaum, deserve a lot of credit because they were the ones who really brought the Pasteur group into action. Willie Rozenbaum, in particular, had the idea to using lymph node tissue instead of blood. If you think about it for a second, you get blood from patients who are dying of AIDS: how many T cells do you expect to find in their blood? Almost none. My lab was receiving only blood samples, and we would get a positive hit of reverse transcriptase in the cultures, which was suggestive of a retrovirus, but then it disappeared right away because there were no CD4 T cells left for virus replication. Some were too low to even measure a blip of reverse transcriptase. So, we had many real short-term isolates, but at that time, none was really characterized. But thanks to Rozenbaum, the Pasteur group started to get lymph node biopsies, and he deserves enormous credit for that. Finally, they got this isolate from the lymph node of a patient named “Bru”, which later turned out not to be from patient “Bru” because even the Pasteur lab, like ours and several others, had their cultures contaminated with LAI/IIIB, a virulent HIV strain that grows like weed. One reason is that IIIB is an X4 strain (i.e., uses CXCR4 as a coreceptor), while the vast majority of wild strains, especially from patients who are not terminally ill, are R5 (i.e., use CCR5 as a coreceptor) and will never grow in regular T-cell lines. Even Luc Montaigner, who had repeatedly denied that he ever had any virus contamination in his lab, had to acknowledge that his cultures got contaminated with LAI/IIIB.
How important was your previous discovery of the first human retrovirus, HTLV-I, and its close relative, HTLV-II? It was fundamental. Without that discovery, nailing down HIV would have been much more challenging because the concept itself of a human retrovirus was extraneous to the scientific community and difficult to accept. A prejudice that we understood way too well when our first paper on HTLV-I was rejected and almost “vilified” by the Journal of Virology. The HTLV-I discovery, which was the result of extraordinary work by some outstanding people in my lab, especially Bernie Poiesz, broke the dogma and showed the world that retroviruses were not restricted to animals and could infect humans as well. Then, of course, the methodology that we developed to discover HTLV-I and -II in the 1970s’ was the same that we applied to the discovery of HIV.
So, you are saying that when you started to look for the cause of AIDS, the technology was already in place. Many young scientists today seem to rely more and more on technology and less and less on creative thinking. How critical was technology in the discovery of HIV? It was critical. But not sufficient. At the beginning of my career, as a young medical doctor, I used to have a lot of insecurity about technology. My Ph.D. colleagues seemed to know everything about technology. I knew too little. So, I was always frustrated and always thought that I needed to learn more. But then you get to realize that technology does not succeed by itself. You cannot make a “golden calf” of technology. You need a mind behind it, to steer it toward the right questions, and to follow the right leads. Choosing the right lead to follow can be hard, especially for the young and inexperienced. You need knowledge, a lot of it, good instinct, and also some luck, that is for sure. However, there were indeed key requirements for the isolation of human retroviruses. The first was the ability to grow primary T cells in vitro. We had solved that problem a few years earlier with the discovery of IL-2, which we called at that time T-cell growth factor, or TCGF. Some call it the first cytokine, even though there was already interferon, which was not considered a cytokine back then. But for sure, it was the first interleukin. This was the basis for it all. And then we needed an assay to identify the footprints of a retrovirus in cell cultures, and this was the reverse transcriptase assay. The seminal discoveries by the late Howard Temin, a dear friend of mine, and David Baltimore had opened the field, but we needed a practical system to detect reverse transcriptase in cell culture supernatants and distinguish it from other confounding polymerase activities present in the cells. And we developed that system, especially thanks to the great work of my colleagues Marv Reitz, Sarang (Mangalasseril Sarangadharan), and Marjorie Robert-Gouroff.
Some reporters have tried to portray the saga around the discovery of HIV as a “war” between the French (Luc Montaigner’s group at Pasteur) and the Americans (Bob Gallo’s group at the NIH), but in reality, it started out as a collaboration across the Atlantic, didn’t it? Of course, it started out as a collaboration between the Pasteur group and us, because initially, I gave the idea of a retrovirus, and then Francoise Barrè-Sinoussi, who at that time was a technician in the laboratory of Jean-Claude Chermann in Montaigner’s Department at Pasteur, traveled to my lab at the NIH to learn how to culture T cells with IL-2 and how to measure 4 Current HIV Research, 2023, Vol. 21, No. 1 Interview reverse transcriptase activity in the cultures. We were glad they were joining us in pursuing the retrovirus hypothesis, and we provided them with all of our protocols and gave them IL-2 and antibodies to HTLV-II and -II. Also, Chermann, who has remained an unsung hero but was the real team leader in the discovery of HIV at Pasteur, was a good friend of mine and visited us many times. And then the first version of their paper on the isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus from a patient at risk for AIDS was rejected at Nature, and I suggested them to submit it to Science, and we helped them to get it published. I was the reviewer at Science and when the Editors argued that there was not enough evidence that their virus was new, I got my colleague Prem Sarin to serve as the second reviewer; we suggested some improvements in the manuscript, and eventually, it got accepted. Later, I was criticized for recommending acceptance in Science because the paper did not provide definitive evidence that their virus was not HTLV-II. But I knew it was the right thing to do. It was urgent to move the field forward as fast as possible. Of course, when I think about it now, it would have been easy to find holes in their paper and reject it, but I am glad we did not. So, we not only collaborated with the French at the beginning of the story, but we also helped them with the publication. Then, unfortunately, came the patent controversy for the blood test revenues, and that created a lot of problems with our collaboration and for them to acknowledge our help. The main limitation of the Pasteur work was that the retrovirus was isolated from an asymptomatic patient, who had just lymphadenopathy but not yet AIDS. So, how could we tell if this virus, even if new, could be the cause of AIDS or simply another opportunistic agent thriving in an immunosuppressed individual? And honestly, from their paper, it was not even so clear that it was a new virus and not merely a variant of HTLV-II, but I knew it had biological effects on T cells that were new. To prove the causal link with AIDS, we needed a blood test, and we needed more isolates to establish a solid linkage to AIDS.
And fortunately, this is the one aspect on which there is no controversy: that you developed the first blood test for HIV, which has saved millions of lives around the world. Well, it is not me again. It is the group. But yes, we decided to go after the blood test right away, because we knew that it was the most urgent thing to do to prove causality and the most consequential to halt the spread of the virus. And we did it.
How did you succeed in such a short time? The breakthrough was the ability to grow the virus in vitro in large quantities. We had outstanding people like Phil Markham and Sarangadharan, but the methods we were using for HTLV-I or -II could not work, because in primary cells, HIV was only growing short-term and did not immortalize T cells. So, Mika Popovic started to throw all the HIV isolates he had in the freezer, we had 48 altogether at that time, into any cell line he could put his hands on, especially T-cell lines, of course. And finally, with my technician Betsy Reed, they found one cell line where the virus started to grow permanently, and that was a Hut-78 clone called H9. In that moment, we knew that in less than 2 months, we would know if this retrovirus was the cause of AIDS. That was the Eureka moment! The tragic irony was that Betsy’s husband was dying of AIDS from a blood transfusion while she was working with the blood of other AIDS patients and helped develop a test that could have saved her husband if only it was available a few months earlier. Once you can grow the virus and you have a lot of it to concentrate, things get much easier to develop an assay. Initially, we started working with ELISA, but soon we found that it was not specific enough: the false positives were too many. And so, we decided that we needed a verification assay to confirm the ELISA positivity, and we thought about Western blot. I had a post-doc from Switzerland in the lab, Jrg Schüpbach, who had worked in a blood bank in Zrich, and he and Sarang started to develop a Western blot, which allows you to see all the proteins by their size. And so, in a few weeks, we were able to back up the ELISA data with a second assay that had a much greater specificity. Previously, Western blot was only a research tool, but we aimed at bringing it to clinical medicine, and we did. At that time, Montaigner’s people were only using immunofluorescence on heterologous lymphocytes derived from different blood donors, which gave those lots of false positives because of the HLA variation between one donor and the other. If you read their first patent, they only had 17% positivity in AIDS patients, which was useless to identify people who were infected but asymptomatic and could transmit the infection.
During your extraordinary career, you made so many seminal contributions that it is difficult to imagine they all came from a single scientist. Do you feel satisfied now or is there something you are still hunting for? I certainly feel much better than in the days when there was all the tension and pressure of HIV discovery and all the controversies, which were really a senseless impediment to science. So, I am happier now: much happier and much more settled. Maybe I am not driven to the same extent as I was back then, but I am certainly as curious as I was back then, and I still feel the sense of wanting to do more. It is not for the competition. Now it is purely for the fun of the science, and I am most interested in solving the pathogenesis of AIDS, which is extremely complex as you know, and I think we are close to it with a series of recent findings that to me are very exciting. You know about the elite controllers, those people who never need therapy because they naturally control HIV in their bodies. Maybe it is only half of a percent of all patients, but we can learn a lot from them. There is a spectrum, right? There are people who die in a much shorter time, like the unlucky lab technician back in those days who was infected while cleaning a centrifuge for mass virus production, got a high load of virus in his blood at the time of infection, and was dead in a few years. That is really fast progression. And then there are regular progressors who develop full-blown AIDS maybe in 8-10 years, and then there are long-term non-progressors, and at the end of the spectrum, elite controllers, who keep the virus down to very low to undetectable levels without treatment. Well, I suspect that the inoculum size that you get at the time of infection counts. Most studies are focused on virus fitness, which some experts say to be lower in these individuals, but if you think about it, the amount of virus you get on day 1 could make a huge difference, even though as far as I am aware, nobody has ever investigated that. In related studies with my long-term colleague and friend, Daniel Zagury, and his Interview Current HIV Research, 2023, Vol. 21, No. 1 5 co-worker, Helène Le Buanec, in Paris, we found that IFN-α plays a critical role in HIV pathogenesis. And then there is another new chapter that we are opening, which relates to a chaperone protein that blocks the ability to repair DNA and completely takes away p53, causing its ubiquitination and presumable degradation, which is also pretty exciting. So, you can see that despite my old age, I am still quite hungry to know more, to learn more, and to discover more.
And finally, Dr. Gallo, is there a lesson for the new generation of scientists that we can take from the HIV discovery saga? I do not know if there is one. The politics were so heavy back then, and the money involved was astronomical. I was told that the HIV patent made more money for the US Treasury than all the other NIH patents in history combined. COVID shares some similarities at the level of financial engagement and the profit for pharmaceutical companies, but the patent war that occurred around HIV affected the academic community very deeply. So, I do not know what to say, if we chop off all the politics and focus only on the scientific endeavor. I am glad that I got an M.D. degree and I am glad that I was insecure about technology because it made me work harder initially, and this paid off later. I would say to the new generation that you have to be daring and never give up. If you get stuck and you are not happy with your research or you are not making progress, do not be afraid to make a move and explore something new. Look at Jim Watson, for example; he left Copenhagen after only one year of post-doc and went to Cambridge where he met Francis Crick who was not that famous, but you know what they have done together. So, do not get stuck if you think you are not making progress, there is always another possibility. You do not want to be trapped with just studying maybe a single segment of heterochromatin for all your life if it is not opening significant new ideas to you. You have to learn the appropriate technology and try to think of something that is important to you and maybe is also important to other people, and then dig in. And you need to have colleagues and friends. Do not isolate yourself. It is important to have time for yourself to think, but you also have to remain engaged with other people. And then try to be humble enough to be ready to learn from other people. There are many kinds of intelligence and you need them all to break through the complexity of reality. You will make mistakes, and I cannot say enough how much I learned from mistakes, but you need to persist. Let me give you an example. Soon after I started at the NIH, I caused a big accident in the lab and I was ready to quit. We were using these humongous 9-feet columns, which had to go through the ceiling of the lab and I had to get permission from the guy above to drill a hole in his floor, which was funny. One day, I was to purify transfer RNA and I got my samples running. It was a nice sunny Saturday afternoon, and I was striving to go out and play tennis, but I was still there hour after hour and this thing was going forever. So, I accelerated the damn pump to make it run faster and faster, and then all of a sudden, boom! It blew up. There I was, with the glass broken and the samples spilled all over the place. So came Monday morning, and I went straight to the lab chief and I said to him: “I am sorry, but I am not made for this. I do not think I am good enough, I am never going to deal with all this technology. I am just too impatient…” And he invited me to his office and there he told me this story: “You know, about 8-9 years ago, we had another M.D., just like you, who came in on a weekend and had to wash the glass pipettes. He set the washer up and left. When we came in on Monday, there was a massive flood in the lab and a huge mess everywhere. So, the young man came to me and told me the same things that you just said: that he did not have it and that he was going to quit. His name was Arthur Kornberg. Fortunately, he did not quit, and a few years later, he won the Nobel Prize for synthesizing DNA in a test tube.” So, he said to me: “Bob, go back to the lab and try again”. I guess it was a good thing that I did not give up.
CONCLUSION We are grateful to Dr. Gallo for talking with us about his discovery of HIV-1 and especially for his extraordinary contributions to science. Who knows how long it would have taken for him and the Pasteur group to identify HIV-1 without the groundbreaking advances that his laboratory had made in the previous decade. His tenacity and determination in pursuing human retroviruses when only very few people in the field were accepting their mere existence – let alone that they could cause major human diseases – is a great example for young scientists to never give up and to go after their intuitions in spite of adversity and failure. It is fascinating to see how the path to discovery never follows a straight line. There are setbacks, wrong leads, periods of stall, and then, all of a sudden, a “eureka” moment. Brilliance is by and large written in your genes, and Dr. Gallo certainly has multiple copies of those genes. But tenacity and determination are characters that can be acquired. And they are fundamental to make a good scientist.
Affective computing is a field of study that focuses on creating systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, and respond to human emotions. It involves the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable computers to understand and respond to human emotions in a natural way. This technology has applications in a wide range of fields, including healthcare, education, entertainment, and marketing.
At its core, affective computing seeks to enable machines to recognize and respond to human emotions in the same way that humans do. This involves developing algorithms and software that can detect and interpret a range of emotional cues, including facial expressions, vocal intonation, body language, and other physiological signals. Once these cues are detected, affective computing systems can then use this information to adapt their responses to better suit the emotional state of the user.
One of the main goals of affective computing is to make human-computer interactions more natural and intuitive. For example, by detecting and interpreting emotional cues, a computer system could adjust its responses to better meet the needs of the user. This could include changing the tone of voice used in a virtual assistant or adjusting the difficulty level of a video game based on the player’s emotional state.
Affective computing has a wide range of potential applications in fields such as healthcare, education, marketing, and entertainment. For example, it could be used to develop more effective mental health treatments, create more engaging video games, or develop more personalized marketing campaigns.
Examples of Affective Computing
Some of the real-life examples include;
Smartphones: Many smartphones now have facial recognition technology that can detect emotions. This allows for features like automatic camera filters that adjust based on your emotional expression, or personalized emojis that change depending on your mood.
Social Media: Social media platforms use affective computing to analyze user data and provide personalized content. For example, Facebook’s algorithm may show you posts that it believes will elicit a positive emotional response based on your past interactions.
Healthcare: Affective computing is being used in the healthcare industry to develop new forms of mental health treatment. For example, some therapists are using virtual reality technology to create immersive, emotionally stimulating environments that can help patients overcome anxiety and other mental health conditions.
Advertising: Companies are using effective computing to create more effective advertising campaigns. For example, they may use eye-tracking technology to measure how long a viewer looks at certain images or to track where their gaze goes on a webpage, helping them to optimize their advertising strategies.
Gaming: Game developers are using effective computing to create more engaging video games. For example, games may use facial recognition technology to detect players’ emotions and adjust the game experience accordingly, or use biofeedback sensors to measure physiological responses like heart rate or skin conductance, which can be used to create more immersive gaming experiences.
However, there are also concerns about the ethical implications of affective computing. Critics worry that the technology could be used to manipulate or exploit users’ emotions, or that it could be used to make decisions that should be made by humans. As the field continues to evolve, it will be important for researchers and developers to address these concerns and ensure that the technology is used in a responsible and ethical manner.
Affective Computing in Action: Real-Life Applications and Benefits
In the future, affective computing is expected to play an increasingly important role in our daily lives, with the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology and with each other. As this technology continues to develop, it is likely that we will see even more advanced systems that are capable of accurately interpreting and responding to a wider range of human emotions.
To learn more about affective computing, check out this excellent new resource by Gyanendra K. Verma (Assistant Professor at Department of Information technology, National Institute of Technology Raipur), Multimodal Affective Computing: Affective Information Representation, Modelling, and Analysis. The book offers readers a concise overview of the state-of-the-art and emerging themes in affective computing, including a comprehensive review of the existing approaches in applied affective computing systems and social signal processing.
Back in 2015, a foundation had been laid by the founders of Open AI with a goal to promote a more preferable quality of life. Artificial Intelligence has been playing an integral part with in our society for the past few decades now. One of best examples of AI in our daily lives is that of the software in a smart phone which has incorporated this technology in photos, maps and many more features. And Open AI’s recent ChatGPT has already created a huge mainstream buzz for the technology.
Artificial Intelligence was first coined by John McCarthy a computer scientist from Boston, Massachusetts and in 1956 he defined Artificial Intelligence (AI) as “The Science and engineering of making intelligent machines”.
Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, research on AI was slow because computing power and funding was inadequate. It was not until the introduction and commercial success of the Expert systems that allowed the research in AI to bring its spark back into the mainstream world. An Expert system is a computer system imitating the decision-making ability of a human expert, these systems were designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as ‘if–then’ rules rather than through conventional procedural code like we do today. The first expert systems were created in the 1970s and then their usage increased over the next decade. These were the first ever successful AI software. A prime example is the MYCINexpert system. MYCIN was an early expert system developed in the early 1970s at Stanford University in Lisp computing language. It used artificial intelligence to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis. The system would recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient’s body weight.
Today, there are several disciplines that rely on AI such in natural sciences, medicine and engineering. AI employs methods such as machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing, and computer simulations to automate and solve many problems. We can see examples of advanced applications self-driving cars and online recommender systems which have had an impact on our quality of life. This new technology is also helping scientists to compile and analyze big data, empowering them to quickly generate structured and understandable results.
AI technology like ChatGPT has been rapidly evolving, with some software getting weekly, and sometimes daily updates. But it’s clear that the potential of AI has some room for improvement. That makes the future look exciting, but also brings up more unanswered questions.
Today, there are many journals that cover the field of artificial intelligence, that have published cutting-edge research papers that truly showcase the power of AI for specific tasks. Bentham Science has recently initiated a journal in this space – The Chinese Journal of Artificial Intelligence (CJAI) – which explores the diverse applications of AI in research from China. You can learn more about the journal here. CJAI also supports Open Access publishing, making AI research in the region more accessible to millions of readers for free. Just like the technologies being funded by Open AI.
Our planet is artificially warming because of the greenhouse gases we are spewing into our air. When we burn fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, we also inadvertently produce CO2, a greenhouse gas. It can’t be helped. Everything we do requires energy, from the cars we drive, to the products made in factories, even the food we eat. And most of this energy requires burning fuels.
That would be ok if our planet was in balance with our sun. That is, if the heat the Earth gives off was exactly the same as the heat the sun warms us with. But in the past hundred years this balance has been grievously upset leading to less of the Earth’s heat able to escape into space since the greenhouse gases inhibit it. It’s the same as when we wrap a blanket around us to keep our body heat from escaping on a cold evening. Due to the excess heat, our planet’s temperature increases and unfortunately, it is continuing to increase.
Global warming causes our climate to change that is to degrade, which is never a good thing for people. Our plans to thrive, maybe even just to survive have been thrown into disarray by our inability to slow down our use of fossil fuels. And global warming doesn’t just cause dangerous rising temperatures: it also leads to rising sea levels, monster storms, greatly reduced food production (which can spur violence), flooding, and more.
Look no further than the natural disasters it has already caused: Widespread flooding such as the ones Pakistan experienced in 2022, extreme weather changes and temperature drops like the winter storm Uri in Texas in 2021, brutal storms such as Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, Harvey, and Irma all driven by global warming, and irreversible tipping points such as ocean acidification, rainforest diebacks, and melting polar ice.
Yes, there is no doubt global warming is life threatening, affecting our way of living and maybe even our survival. But with problems come opportunities. We can solve global warming and by so doing we can also prosper. It’s not simple but it is doable. But only if we act now.
Still not convinced about global warming? Check out Robert “Bob” De Saro’snew book A Crisis Like No Other: Understanding and Defeating Global Warming. In his book, Bob provides everything you need to know about our climate change crisis from the psychology of denial and what to do about it, to the science behind global warming, and how we can solve it. Bob’s book is fast paced, easy to read, at times humorous, and always scientifically accurate. Now it is your turn. And your opportunity, so let’s get to it while we still can.
Drug repurposing (also known as drug repositioning or DR) is a strategy for discovering new uses for FDA approved and investigational drugs. It is therefore, an effective process for identifying new therapeutic uses for old/existing and available drugs. Drug Repurposing offers several advantages over developing a novel drug for a given sign. There are examples from our past are which provide ample amount of evidence in favor of drug repurposing or drug repositioning.
Better the drugs you know than the drugs you do not know
It is a promising, fast, and cost effective method that has allowed researchers to forfeit traditional methodologies in drug discovery and development. Traditional methods of finding new drugs take a long time, and there are many regulatory barriers. It can take 9-10 years for a new medicine to come to the market through the normal method.
Some examples of drug repurposing
Drug repurposing is not a new activity. Some examples include
Aspirin is a Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) an antithrombotic medicine used for pain, fever and / or inflammation since 1899 all over the world.
Thalidomide was first introduced as an oral medication used by pregnant women to relieve morning sickness, anxiety, sleeping disorder. Now it is used as a first line treatment for multiples of cancer types including Multiple myeloma and various skin conditions such as leprosy and it is consumed orally.
Sildenafil a drug introduced initially as a reliever of heart pain but later new uses were discovered for it as a medication for erectile dysfunction which is now prescribed over 2 million times in the USA and is cited as a prime example for Drug Repositioning / Drug Repurposing.
A recent example for of drug repurposing is COVID-19 medication which utilized anti-parasitic drugs such as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine which were repurposed for the treatment of the disease.
Although drug repurposing is an effective way of treatment it does come with limitations such as a high cost of clinical trials, lack of patent protection and commercialization, FDA offers only a period of three years exclusively for a new use of previously used drug for a new indication, which is a very short period of time to regain the invested money and in case a loss for the pharmaceutical industry.
The pharmaceutical industry has seen a lot of changes over the past few decades, Covid-19 vaccine and the case of Viagra before that has produced a whole new meaning of Drug Repurposing. It is beneficial at most times but this does not mean that they do not have any short comings.
You can read all about drug repurposing in the new book Drug Repurposing against SARS-CoV-2 (edited by Tabish Qidwai)to learn more about it.
Chitosan is a biopolymer that has been widely used in medical, pharmaceutical, agricultural, cosmetics, food as well as textile, and paper industries due to its biocompatibility, biodegradability, non-toxic, and less allergenic nature. In recent times, chitosan has gained much attention for its application in the form of nanofibres. Nanofibres have diameters in the range of 1 to 100 nanometers. Various processing techniques like drawing, template synthesis, phase separation, melt-blown technology, bicomponent extrusion, self-assembly and electro-spinning are involved in the fabrication of nanofibres. Among these techniques, electro-spinning is the most widely and commonly used technique as it generates ultra-thin nanofibres and has the capacity for mass production. This article reviews the process of electro-spinning and applications of the nanofibres containing chitosan in the areas of enzyme immobilization, filtration, wound dressing, tissue engineering, drug delivery, catalysis, and as an analytical system, biosensor, and diagnostic aid in detail.
The discovery and development of the drug/vaccine for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the process of developing a preventive vaccine or treatment drug to reduce the severity of COVID-19. Internationally, hundreds of pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, university research groups, and the World Health Organization (WHO) have developed vaccines for the past few centuries. Currently, they are continuously putting effort into developing possible therapies for COVID-19 disease, which are now at various stages of the preclinical or clinical research stage. In addition, researchers are trying to accelerate the development of vaccines, antiviral drugs, and postinfection treatments. Many previously approved drug candidates are already studied to alleviate discomfort during the disease complication. In this paper, we reviewed the research progress of COVID-19 therapeutic drugs.
Extensive studies have explored potential therapies against multiple myeloma (MM), whether in hospitals, universities or in private institutional settings. Scientists continue to study the mechanism(s) underlying the disease as a basis for the development of more effective treatment options. There are many therapeutic agents and treatment regimens used for multiple myeloma. Unfortunately, no cure or definitive treatment options exist. The goal of treatment is to maintain the patient in remission for as long as possible. Therapeutic agents used in combination can effectively maintain patients in remission. While these therapies have increased patient survival, a significant number of patients relapse. The off-target toxicity and resistance exhibited by target cells remain a challenge for existing approaches. Ongoing efforts to understand the biology of the disease offer the greatest chance to improve therapeutic options. Nanoparticles (targeted drug delivery systems) offer new hope and directions for therapy. This review summarizes FDA-approved agents for the treatment of MM, highlights the clinical barriers to treatment, including adverse side effects normally associated with the use of conventional agents, and describes how nanotherapeutics have overcome barriers to impede conventional treatments.
Bentham Science 
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