Subsequences of automatic sequences and uniform distribution

Automatic sequences and their number theoretic properties have been intensively studied during the last 20 or 30 years. Since automatic sequences are quite regular (they just have linear subword complexity) they cannot be used as quasi-random sequences. However, the situation changes drastically when one uses proper subsequences, for example the subsequence along primes or squares. It is conjectured that the resulting sequences are normal sequences which could be already proved for the Thue-Morse sequence along the subsequence of squares. This kind of research is very challenging and was mainly motivated by the Gelfond problems for the sum-of-digits function. In particular during the last few years there was a spectacular progress due to the Fourier analytic method by Mauduit and Rivat. In this article we survey these recent developments, comment on the proof methods and formulate quite general conjectures. We also present a new result on the subsequence along primes of so-called invertible automatic sequences.