Volume 3 Issue 10, October 2021

The radiomics features of disease lesions can be learned from medical imaging data, but is it possible to identify interpretable biomarkers that can help make clinical predictions across heterogeneous diseases and data from different modalities?

AI has impacted many fields, but hearing has lagged behind. This Perspective calls for a collaboration between the AI and hearing communities, with the goal of transforming hearing healthcare and research.

The development of extra fingers and arms is an exciting research area in robotics, human–machine interaction and wearable electronics. It is unclear, however, whether humans can adapt and learn to control extra limbs and integrate them into a new sensorimotor representation, without sacrificing their natural abilities. The authors review this topic and describe challenges in allocating neural resources for robotic body augmentation.

T-cell immunity is driven by the interaction between peptides presented by major histocompatibility complexes (pMHCs) and T-cell receptors (TCRs). Only a small proportion of neoantigens elicit T-cell responses, and it is not clear which neoantigens are recognized by which TCRs. The authors develop a transfer learning model to predict TCR binding specificity to class-I pMHCs.

Turbulent optical distortions in the atmosphere limit the ability of optical technologies such as laser communication and long-distance environmental monitoring. A new method using adversarial networks learns to counter the physical processes underlying the turbulence so that complex optical scenes can be reconstructed.

Camera trapping is a widely adopted method for monitoring terrestrial mammals. However, a drawback is the amount of human annotation needed to keep pace with continuous data collection. The authors developed a hybrid system of machine learning and humans in the loop, which minimizes annotation load and improves efficiency.

A growing number of researchers are developing approaches to improve fairness in machine learning applications in areas such as healthcare, employment and social services, to avoid propagating and amplifying racial and other inequities. An empirical study explores the trade-off between increasing fairness and model accuracy across several social policy areas and finds that this trade-off is negligible in practice.

The use of sparse signals in spiking neural networks, modelled on biological neurons, offers in principle a highly efficient approach for artificial neural networks when implemented on neuromorphic hardware, but new training approaches are needed to improve performance. Using a new type of activity-regularizing surrogate gradient for backpropagation combined with recurrent networks of tunable and adaptive spiking neurons, state-of-the-art performance for spiking neural networks is demonstrated on benchmarks in the time domain.

Combining generative models and reinforcement learning has become a promising direction for computational drug design, but it is challenging to train an efficient model that produces candidate molecules with high diversity. Jike Wang and colleagues present a method, using knowledge distillation, to condense a conditional transformer model to make it usable in reinforcement learning while still generating diverse molecules that optimize multiple molecular properties.

In the AlphaPilot Challenge, teams compete to fly autonomous drones through an obstacle course as fast as possible. The 2019 winning team MAVLab reflects on the challenge of beating human pilots.