We call this a human/computer learning network, whose core is an active learning feedback loop between humans and machines that dramatically improves the quality of both and thereby continually improves the effectiveness of the network as a whole. In this article we explore how human/computer learning networks can leverage the contributions of human observers and process their contributed data with artificial intelligence algorithms leading to a computational power that far exceeds the sum of the individual parts. For example, projects such as Galaxy Zoo, eBird, and FoldIt demonstrate the power of engaging the public in the investigation of a variety of large-scale scientific problems. These and similar projects leverage emerging techniques that integrate the speed and scalability of mechanical computation, using advances in artificial intelligence (AI), with the real intelligence of human computation to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing algorithms (Law and von Ahn 2011). Human computational systems use the innate abilities of humans to solve certain problems that computers cannot solve (Man-Ching, Ling-Jyh, and King 2009).

Alternatively, the web can be used to engage volunteers to actively collect data and submit it to central data repositories. Human observers and AI processes synergistically improve the overall quality of the entire system. Additionally, AI is used to generate analyses. These analyses also improve as the quantity and quality of the incoming data improves. By guiding Now systems are being developed that employ observers with immediate feedback on both human and mechanical computation to solve observation accuracy AI processes contribute to complex problems through active learning and advancing observer expertise. These human/computer learning observer data quality improves, the training data networks (HCLNs) can leverage the contributions on which the AI processes make their decisions of broad recruitment of human observers and also improves.

In this paper we describe eBird, a citizen-science project that takes advantage of human observational capacity and machine learning methods to explore the synergies between human computation and mechanical computation. We call this model a Human/Computer Learning Network, whose core is an active learning feedback loop between humans and machines that dramatically improves the quality of both, and thereby continually improves the effectiveness of the network as a whole. Human/Computer Learning Networks leverage the contributions of a broad recruitment of human observers and processes their contributed data with Artificial Intelligence algorithms leading to a computational power that far exceeds the sum of the individual parts.