News & Comment

David Oh was lead flight director for the Curiosity Mars rover and is now part of NASA’s mission to Psyche, a 200-km-wide metal asteroid. Our editor Yann Sweeney met with David at SIGGRAPH Asia to discuss whether advances in AI could improve autonomous robots for space exploration.

After a difficult start, medicinal chemists are now ready to embrace AI-based methods and concepts in drug discovery, explains Gisbert Schneider.

Preprints provide an efficient way for scientific communities to share and discuss results. We encourage authors to post preprints on arXiv, bioRxiv or other recognized community preprint platforms.

By organizing Kaggle competitions, astrophysicist Thomas Kitching can focus on asking the right questions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to be an invaluable tool for nature conservation, but its misuse could have severe real-world consequences for people and wildlife. Conservation scientists discuss how improved metrics and ethical oversight can mitigate these risks.

To attract and retain talent from all backgrounds, new educational models and mentorship programmes are needed in machine intelligence, says Shannon Wongvibulsin.

Yuanfang Guan explains how taking part in data challenges has helped her learn new analytical techniques and creatively apply them on a variety of datasets.

As artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning are high on the agenda everywhere, Nature Machine Intelligence launches to stimulate collaborations between different disciplines.

Debate about the impacts of AI is often split into two camps, one associated with the near term and the other with the long term. This divide is a mistake — the connections between the two perspectives deserve more attention, say Stephen Cave and Seán S. ÓhÉigeartaigh.

Ken Goldberg reflects on how four exciting sub-fields of robotics — co-robotics, human–robot interaction, deep learning and cloud robotics — accelerate a renewed trend toward robots working safely and constructively with humans.