Networked Intelligence: Active Shared Context Graphs for Human-AI Team Science
Authors: Sutanay Choudhury, Jeffrey J. Czajka, Lummy M. O. Monteiro, Erin Bredeweg, Jason McDermott, Katherine Wolf, Alex Beliaev, Josh Elmore, +10 more
Organizations: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Richland, WA, USA
Abstract
Most AI-for-science systems focus on scaling a single reasoning process through better models, larger context windows, long-horizon agentic execution, or digital co-scientists working with one principal user. However, challenging scientific problems are rarely solved by one reasoner alone. They are solved by teams whose members bring different priors, experimental backgrounds, tacit knowledge, and domain-trained intuitions. The open problem is therefore not only how to scale models, but how to cultivate networked intelligence: scaling the connections between humans and AI systems so that a result or hypothesis produced in one context reaches another person, agent, instrument, or robot that can act on it. We introduce Mycelium, an active shared workspace that automatically connects researchers and AI agents as a multi-user co-scientist. As human users and agents work, the system captures important observations and hypotheses, tracks how they relate to the team's evolving model, and routes them to the person or agent whose next decision they can inform. We evaluate Mycelium in its first empirical test, a biological multi-omics campaign in which routed shared context turned a local analytical finding into a cross-expert mechanistic constraint and ultimately into an experimental design. We also give networked intelligence a computational account as sparse conditional computation over distributed scientific contexts. This account distinguishes when a scaled standalone agent can match the network from when independent expertise and non-mergeable contexts make the network irreducible.
Scientific discovery demands intelligence, perseverance, and serendipity across vast search spaces. Today, top scientific capabilities remain siloed--one AI system for biological analysis, another for clinical reasoning, mathematical derivation, or materials simulation--and no pre-designed team can anticipate every skill a question will need. Science Earth is a planet-scale scientific runtime in which any capability--a simulation cluster, a wet-lab robot, a proof engine, a single-cell pipeline--can connect to any other, with collaboration structure emerging from the question itself. Its underlying EACN protocol lets capabilities discover one another, negotiate task ownership, and adjudicate across incompatible evidentiary standards without prior knowledge of who will meet whom. This shifts the organizing challenge from workflow design to open-ended connectivity. Two runs validate this under structurally distinct conditions. In a trans-Pacific higher-order Kuramoto synchronization study, agents identified and corrected a closure-ratio assumption in Ott-Antonsen analytic theory that fails outside the Lorentzian limit, within thirty minutes. In an eight-agent single-cell run on the 4.88M-cell Kang 2024 pan-cancer atlas, heterogeneous capabilities coupled over a 64.9-hour window with one structural external instruction, producing three new result layers and anchoring findings against an independent wet-lab study on an adjacent CCR8- TIGIT+ Treg subset. These cases are a first empirical reading, not a benchmark sweep. They show that when AI capabilities are truly connectable and coordination emerges from the problem, scientific reasoning becomes a distributed, self-correcting process--a step towards scaling AI-native discovery to the planet.
Scientific evidence often spans instruments, databases, and disciplines, so no single source records the full phenomenon. This makes it difficult to determine when coordinated AI agents add value over simpler scientific workflows. We evaluate this question with a cross-domain benchmark spanning four scientific tasks: mapping molecular structure into musical representations, detecting historical paradigm shifts in science, identifying vector-borne disease emergence, and vetting transiting-exoplanet candidates. Each case uses a frozen evaluation panel, predefined scoring protocols, explicit baselines, ablations or null controls, and stated limitations. The results define three operating regimes. When different disciplines each capture only part of the phenomenon, cross-channel composites improve over single-channel baselines: climate-vector emergence reaches AUROC 0.944 and exoplanet vetting reaches AUROC 0.955. However, the exoplanet workflow is effectively tied with a strong combined-summary baseline, showing that decomposition does not always improve top-line performance. When one signal dominates, as in paradigm-shift detection, coordination mainly improves interpretation and traceability. For molecular sonification, the gain is representational rather than predictive. ScienceClaw x Infinite provides the auditable artifact and provenance layer for this evaluation. The benchmark therefore assigns value to coordination only when the corresponding performance, provenance, or representation claim is supported by explicit comparators.
Automated AI agents are increasingly capable, yet many scientific and professional tasks require human judgment and contextual expertise. We use simulated shared-workspace human-AI teams as a controlled testbed for studying how collaboration structure shapes team behavior. Using the Collaborative Gym environment with tasks from DiscoveryBench, we vary team compositions and collaboration structures across 1,482 sessions. We find that adding additional collaborators can lower performance when coordination structure is absent. We then evaluate collaboration scaffolding that combines shared group memory with simulated human-in-the-loop (HITL) gates, where selected actions require approval from a designated simulated participant. This scaffolding improves performance, most clearly in three-person teams, with clearer responsibility signals and stronger routing of expertise to team actions. Overall, our results suggest that coordination structure is central to whether available capability improves team outcomes.