Volume 3 Issue 7, July 2021

Traditional sensing techniques apply computational analysis at the output of the sensor hardware to separate signal from noise. A new, more holistic and potentially more powerful approach proposed in this Perspective is designing intelligent sensor systems that ‘lock-in’ to optimal sensing of data, making use of machine leaning strategies.

As highly automated systems become pervasive in society, enforceable governance principles are needed to ensure safe deployment. This Perspective proposes a pragmatic approach where independent audit of AI systems is central. The framework would embody three AAA governance principles: prospective risk Assessments, operation Audit trails and system Adherence to jurisdictional requirements.

Experimental benchmarks such as ImageNet and Atari games play an important part in advancing artificial intelligence research. An analysis of results and papers linked to 25 popular benchmarks shows that research dynamics beyond conventional co-authorship has developed in this area.

Calcium imaging is a valuable tool for recording in vivo neural activity, but the task of extracting signals of individual neurons is computationally challenging. Bao and colleagues present a U-Net-based method that is both accurate and fast enough to potentially allow real-time processing and closed-loop experiments.

In the last few years, computational protein structure prediction has greatly advanced by combining deep learning including convolutional residual networks (ResNet) with co-evolution data. A new study finds that using deeper and wider ResNets improves predictions in the absence of co-evolution information, suggesting that the ResNets do not not simply de-noise co-evolution signals, but instead may learn important protein sequence–structure relationships.

The urgency of the developing COVID-19 epidemic has led to a large number of novel diagnostic approaches, many of which use machine learning. DeGrave and colleagues use explainable AI techniques to analyse a selection of these approaches and find that the methods frequently learn to identify features unrelated to the actual disease.

Neural networks are becoming increasingly popular for applications in various domains, but in practice, further methods are necessary to make sure the models are learning patterns that agree with prior knowledge about the domain. A new approach introduces an explanation method, called ‘expected gradients’, that enables training with theoretically motivated feature attribution priors, to improve model performance on real-world tasks.

Monoclonalization, the isolation and expansion of a single cell derived from a cultured population, is an essential step in large-scale human cell culture and experiments. A new deep learning-based workflow called Monoqlo automatically detects colony presence and identifies clonality from cellular imaging, enabling single-cell selection protocols to be scalable while minimizing technical variability.

Particle image velocimetry is an imaging technique to determine the velocity components of flow fields, of use in a range of complex engineering problems including in environmental, aerospace and biomedical engineering. A recurrent neural network-based approach for learning displacement fields in an end-to-end manner is applied to this technique and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and, moreover, allows generalization to new data, eliminating the need for traditional handcrafted models.