December 2021
LC LABS LETTER
A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team
LC Labs Experiments
Humans in the Loop experiment pairs machine learning and human expertise
Starting in 2020, our team collaborated with data solutions provider AVP to prototype workflows combining machine learning and crowdsourcing. Our previous work on machine learning taught us that fine-tuned training data for historical content is important and rare. The reports we’ve commissioned and worked on also emphasize that human decision-making is at the heart of any machine learning process; so is the potential for risk and biases introduced by these human elements.
The latest Humans in the Loop initiative researched and prototyped workflows for ethically, engagingly, and usefully combining crowdsourcing tasks to inform machine learning processes and vice versa.The result is a four-stage framework for designing ethical and impactful human-in-the-loop approaches.