Machine learning and computation-enabled intelligent sensor design

Over the past several decades the dramatic increase in the availability of computational resources, coupled with the maturation of machine learning, has profoundly impacted sensor technology. In this Perspective, we discuss computational sensing with a focus on intelligent sensor system design. By leveraging inverse design and machine learning techniques, data acquisition hardware can be fundamentally redesigned to ‘lock-in’ to the optimal sensing data with respect to a user-defined cost function or design constraint. We envision a new generation of computational sensing systems that reduce the data burden while also improving sensing capabilities, enabling low-cost and compact sensor implementations engineered through iterative analysis of data-driven sensing outcomes. We believe that the methodologies discussed in this Perspective will permeate the design phase of sensing hardware, and thereby will fundamentally change and challenge traditional, intuition-driven sensor and readout designs in favour of application-targeted and perhaps highly non-intuitive implementations. Such computational sensors enabled by machine learning can therefore foster new and widely distributed applications that will benefit from ‘big data’ analytics and the internet of things to create powerful sensing networks, impacting various fields, including for example, biomedical diagnostics, environmental sensing and global health, among others. 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.