Are Amazon Alexa and Google Home limited to our bedrooms, or can they be used in hospitals? Do you envision a future where physicians work hand-in-hand with voice AI to revolutionize healthcare delivery? In the near future, clinical smart assistants will be able to automate many manual hospital tasks-and this will be only the beginning of the changes to come. Voice AI is the future of physician-machine interaction and this Focus book provides invaluable insight on its next frontier. It begins with a brief history and current implementations of voice-activated assistants and illustrates why clinical voice AI is at its inflection point. Next, it describes how the authors built the world's first smart surgical assistant using an off-the-shelf smart home device, outlining the implementation process in the operating room. From quantitative metrics to surgeons' feedback, the authors discuss the feasibility of this technology in the surgical setting. The book then provides an in-depth development guideline for engineers and clinicians desiring to develop their own smart surgical assistants. Lastly, the authors delve into their experiences in translating voice AI into the clinical setting and reflect on the challenges and merits of this pursuit. The world's first smart surgical assistant has not only reduced surgical time but eliminated major touch points in the operating room, resulting in positive, significant implications for patient outcomes and surgery costs. From clinicians eager for insight on the next digital health revolution to developers interested in building the next clinical voice AI, this book offers a guide for both audiences.

This book covers state-of-the-art topics on the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems and intelligent assistants in everyday applications. It presents scientific achievements in language processing that result in the development of successful applications and addresses general issues regarding the advances in Spoken Dialog Systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. Emphasis is placed on the following topics: speaker/language recognition, user modeling / simulation, evaluation of dialog system, multi-modality / emotion recognition from speech, speech data mining, language resource and databases, machine learning for spoken dialog systems and educational and healthcare applications.

It is well accepted that progress in biological and biochemical researches is based mainly on a better understanding of life processes on a molecular level. For this, modern chemical techniques for structural elucidation even of sophisticated biomolecules and theoretical and mechanistic considerations involving biological macromolecules help the understanding of structure-function relations, metabolic processes, molecular and cellular recognition and the reproduction of life. On the other hand, controlled manipulation of the struc ture of biological macromolecules and the synthesis of well designed biomimetic models are the basic tools used in bio organic chemistry, a field at the -border line between classical biochemistry and classical organic chemistry. For this, increas ing number of chemists and biochemists are studying simple synthetic molecules as models of enzyme action, ion transport across membranes and in general receptor-substrate inter action. This new series, Bioorganic Chemistry Frontiers, will at tempt to bring together critical reviews on the progress in this field. In this second volume of the series, six different active domains are covered and are presented to stress the diversity and scope of bioorganic chemistry. They include the design of artificial nucleases (Corey, Zuckermann, and Schultz), molecu lar tweezers (Zimmerman), hydrolytic cleavage with metal complexes (Chin, Banaszczyk, Jubian, Kim, and Maejen), dif ferent aspects of molecular recognition (Hamilton), supramole cular assemblies and functional models of membranes and enzymes (Murakami and Kikuchi) and the concept ofmolecu lar topology (Sauvage and Dietrich). Each subject uses a "molecular" language common to the chemist, the biologist, and the pharmacologist."

The superconductivity of MgB2 has been hidden for nearly 50 years although it has the highest Tc among the intermetallics superconductors. Beside the high Tc, simple crystal structure, large coherence length, high critical field, transparency of grain boundaries to current flow and low normal state resistivity MgB2 is a fascinating topic to study for both large scale application and electronic devices. Moreover, the presence of two-gap superconductivity (d and o band) has been theoretically and experimentally established. However, critical current density of pristine MgB2 drops rapidly in the high magnetic field due to the weak pinning centres and low upper critical field. During the past three years, novel techniques and developments for fabrication of useable MgB2 have been reported, including chemical alloying, irradiation, thermo-mechanical processing techniques and magnetic shielding to improve the critical density, upper critical field and the irreversibility field. Among the studies, atomic substitution, especially using nano-particles, may help in clarification of the superconductivity mechanism thus making it appropriate for practical application. On the other hand, the momentum of enhancing flux pinning using chemical doping is moving to a positive side. Nano-SiC powder is well known for effective improvement of the critical current density. In this book, a brief introduction of superconductivity in MgB2 is introduced. Further, the basic electronic and magnetic properties of the MgB2 as well as its crystal structure are reviewed. The authors also discuss the preparation method that has been well developed for experimentation on MgB2. Along with that, they review the experimental results of the chemical alloying on MgB2, particularly on the critical current density. In addition, the future prospects of MgB2 and developments for applications in the current superconductivity market are given.