Exploring CrowdBots: a new evolutionary pathway for citizen science projects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Collective hybrid intelligence may serve as an effective progression in the evolution of crowd-powered systems such as citizen science projects, which rely on human cognition. Supervised machine learning has been treated as a panacea for automated image classification under the assumption that prediction performance depends primarily on the quality and volume of the training corpus, which is often obtained through crowdsourcing. We have observed that this assumption may fall short when accurate classification depends upon contextual knowledge that is not encoded in the pixels or on the inference needed to apply that knowledge. We organized a machine learning competition using data previously analysed by humans on our “Stall Catchers” citizen science platform, which gave rise to models exhibiting a range of performance characteristics. Though none of these models exhibits classification performance sufficient to replace Stall Catchers, the sensitivity and bias distributions of these models are remarkably similar to those of human volunteers, suggesting the models' suitability for crowd-based participation. We are currently conducting studies to examine the extent to which such human/AI ensembles may give purpose to imperfect ML models as an intermediate practicable step toward fully automated solutions. Our workshop sought to motivate and communicate this approach via three talks followed by a Hybrid AI simulation game, in which workshop participants broke out into teams to design hybrid AI architectures that employ CrowdBots for existing and imagined citizen science scenarios. This workshop seeded a collection of novel information processing configurations that leverage this new approach to combining AI and human cognition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".