Imagine All the People: Citizen Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Computational Research
This is an incremental proposal for enhancing federal research and societal problem-solving through combined human-AI efforts.
The paper argues that integrating citizen science and crowdsourcing with AI, IoT, and cloud technologies can address scientific and societal challenges by leveraging complementary human and machine capabilities, potentially accelerating federal government priorities.
Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning have advanced significantly over the past decade. Nonetheless, humans possess unique abilities such as creativity, intuition, context and abstraction, analytic problem solving, and detecting unusual events. To successfully tackle pressing scientific and societal challenges, we need the complementary capabilities of both humans and machines. The Federal Government could accelerate its priorities on multiple fronts through judicious integration of citizen science and crowdsourcing with artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud strategies.