A problem of interest in geometric measure theory both in discrete and continuous settings is the identification of algebraic and geometric patterns in thin sets. The first two lectures will be a survey of the literature on pattern recognition in sparse sets, with a greater emphasis on continuum problems. The second two contain an exposition of recent work, joint in part with Vincent Chan, Kevin Henriot and Izabella Laba on the existence of linear and polynomial configurations in multi-dimensional Lebesgue-null sets satisfying appropriate Hausdorff and Fourier dimensionality conditions.