biology experts remotasks

biology experts remotasks

The Role of Biology Experts in Remote Tasks

1. Introduction to Remote Tasks and Biology Experts

One driver of AI and automation technologies is the desire to substitute for human labor. With the exception of decision processes that require subjective or normative information, such as patent examination, much expert labor can be reproduced with cheaper, faster, and better computer machines. For processes that are fully or partially robotic, such as robo-surgery and parcel sorting, the human expert is fully replaced. In the case of remote tasks, human experts remain in the human loop as teleoperators.

An established research question in the political economy of AI and automation is the compensation of substituting workers. The demand for human labor in a specific field is reduced, as robotic engineers and software developers program machines to do their work. For some experts, these products are not simply substitutes, but are desirable complements since humans use them only as they offer output enhancement. The guidance of fully autonomous machines does not feature human interaction, and that may matter for some kinds of remote tasks. As civic education and political economy teach, humans should program and own the smart machines that serve human needs so that their abilities are aligned with human objectives.

There is a significant lack of understanding that leads to poor computer designs that hinder machine programming. One of the four existing white-box issues is human unpredictability, the difficulty humans have to understand, describe, and communicate task environment actions and reactions as well as decision-making mechanisms. Despite common perceptions, human biases do not always affect the performance of tasks. Humans write codes and record data that adaptively improve machine performance. AI and simulations can and have been applied to this computer design difficulty in the creation of more human-predictable white-box technologies. As of this writing, however, these computer designs offer feature sets for specific machine tasks, such as audio captioning for autistic people, without delivering general solutions for interactively enhancing human understanding; those costs are borne by humans. Ultimately, the concept of white-box AI technologically delivers precision driven by human understanding, confidence, and control of inputs. Benefit comes by setting guaranteed bounds on the cost to repair controllable uncertainty, translating into an intelligent enabling of user error. These ideals can be found, for example, in assistive information filtering products as well as models to accommodate degenerate training data by informing respect for task environment rules, or behavior transfer tasks needed to train autonomously operated robotics.

2. Benefits of Utilizing Biology Experts in Remote Tasks

Biology knowledge can greatly assist in processing collections that represent the world’s taxonomic knowledge. This can be utilized in many tasks, including applications to biology-related, computer-based, society-related, and distant language relationships. Directed at evaluating current and potential roles for biology experts in computer-assisted communications projects, our scoping study results showed that computers could be programmed to assist in undertaking remotely such tasks. The needed tools and tasks are outlined, as well as the possibilities that lie in the utilization for commercial or societal purposes. Rapidly developing communication transcription technologies are assessed for their capabilities, and an experimental task is discussed in some detail.

By improving these capabilities, a 21st-century task can be envisioned in managing collections containing humanity’s ecological, geological, and physical records. Directed at evaluating current and potential roles for biology experts in computer-assisted communications projects, our scoping study results showed that computers could be programmed to assist in undertaking remotely such tasks. The needed tools and tasks are outlined, as well as the possibilities that lie in the utilization for commercial or societal purposes. Rapidly developing communication transcription technologies are assessed for their capabilities, and an experimental task is discussed in some detail. We employed the “plant” field as an area of expertise to be evaluated and considered 30 professionals in 5 countries knowledgeable on this field.

3. Challenges and Solutions in Integrating Biology Experts into Remote Task Platforms

Biological data presents its own unique challenges when it comes to error rates, relational relevance, and multiple expert triggering paradigms. The biggest source of error in biological data is poor classification capability. In most cases, this capability is too expensive or slow to be done on a consistent basis for true near real-time performance. The high-level task in which our biological data task falls into is one generally easy to obtain, maybe on the order of seconds for an expert. After the high-level task is triggered, experts can reveal lower level detail in a progressive manner, but the stakes (time and bandwidth) are already sunk by the knowledge of the high level task. This progressive workload expert tale is a recurring theme and certainly is the basis of our biological expert triggering technique.

In this class of task, data can be completely assembled post task trigger. The experts needed in these tasks can range from highly specialized (phylogenist) to nearly amateur (expert bird watcher), and the importance of evolving the complexity triggering function based on expert cost, error rate, and natural availability. Our primary focus on this task was observing natural behavior and discovering patterns for part of a larger tropical montane cloud forest. Due to the focused data needed (bird watching) along with delicate optical (light/dark) window, the remote nodes were rated as 24/3 (only usable during daylight) reachable but typical systems rated for many days to weeks degradation in stability and performance. Given the opportunity to reduce our bias through monitoring, it became an efficient use of remote sensing bandwidth, as long as we trigger enough to keep our experts in the loop.

4. Best Practices for Maximizing the Contribution of Biology Experts in Remote Tasks

In this section, we provide a list of best practices that have been drawn from a variety of approaches experts used in coordinating and communicating with alien biology specialists across different disciplines. Keeping these suggestions in mind when recruiting biology experts, when training those experts, or when considering the types of tools that will be useful to them, could result in more effective reporting and identification of findings. By adopting these suggestions, social science research teams can engender benefits for the broader community examining independent problem-solving capacity by domain experts in settings where the expert benefits from a measure of independence in decision-making, such as charity, management, and policy contexts.

We propose the following best practices based on a survey and workshop, conducted over several years, with experts who have experience coordinating and communicating with alien biology specialists from a variety of life science sub-disciplines. These experts include astronomers who are part of the Astrobiology community, researchers, and educators who have participated in several worldwide workshops that were designed to foster collaborations between the fields of astrobiology, cognitive science, and psychology, and those involved in science education, presentation development, and execution of live public education of life science research in medical uses of space at PARI.