The advent of Industry 4.0 has made it possible to collect huge quantities of data on the operation of complex systems and components, such as production plants, power stations, engines and bearings. Based on such information, deep learning techniques can be applied to assess the state of the equipment under observation, to detect if anomalous conditions have arised, and to predict the remaining useful lifetime, so that suitable maintenance actions can be planned. Unfortunately, data driven approaches often require very expensive training sessions, and may have problems in learning very rare conditions such as faults. Interestingly, the systems under inspection often come with substantial background knowledge on the structure of the design, the operation conditions, and the typical malfunctions. The goal of this PhD thesis is to empower machine learning algorithms to exploit such background knowledge, thus achieving higher levels of accuracy with less training data.