Soon into the COVID-19 pandemic, civil-rights groups raised the alarm over the increase in digital surveillance infringing on individual rights. But there are other potential harms as tech companies accelerate their expansion into new areas essential to public-service provision.

Unsupervised machine learning algorithms reduce the dependence on curated, labeled datasets that are characteristic of supervised machine learning. The authors argue that the developmental science of infant cognition could inform the design of unsupervised machine learning approaches.

Both proteins and natural language are essentially based on a sequential code, but feature complex interactions at multiple scales, which can be useful when transferring machine learning models from one domain to another. In this Review, Ferruz and Höcker summarize recent advances in language models, such as transformers, and their application to protein design.

Deep learning methods can provide useful predictions for drug design, but their hyperparameters need to be carefully tweaked to give good performance on a specific problem or dataset. Li et al. present here a method that finds appropriate architectures and hyperparameters for a wide range of drug design tasks and can achieve good performance without human intervention.

Exoskeletons can assist movement in upper limb impairments to recover mobility and independence, but rigid or heavy exoskeletons can be impractical. Georgarakis and colleagues have developed a soft, tendon-driven device that assists shoulder movements and counteracts gravity to reduce muscle fatigue.

Neural networks in the brain often exhibit chaotic dynamics that can be captured by a small number of dimensions. Farrell et al. find that recurrent neural networks trained with gradient-based learning rules exhibit similar features. This helps form robust but generalizable input representations.

Robots usually learn to use tools from direct experience or from observing the use of a tool. While knowledge can be transferred between similar tools, novel and creative use of tools is challenging. Tee and colleagues present a method where skill transfer does not come from experience of using other tools but from using the robot’s own limbs.

While reinforcement learning can be a powerful tool for complex design tasks such as molecular design, training can be slow when problems are either too hard or too easy, as little is learned in these cases. Jeff Guo and colleagues provide a curriculum learning extension to the REINVENT de novo molecular design framework that provides problems of increasing difficulty over epochs such that the training process is more efficient.

A variational autoencoder is trained on a dataset of quantum optics experiment configurations and learns an interpretable representation of the relationship between experiment setup and quantum entanglement. The approach can be used to explore new experiment designs with specific, highly entangled states.

Soon into the COVID-19 pandemic, civil-rights groups raised the alarm over the increase in digital surveillance infringing on individual rights. But there are other potential harms as tech companies accelerate their expansion into new areas essential to public-service provision.

A biomimetic sense of touch could ground robots better in the physical world and improve their interactions with humans.