Networked Intelligence: Active Shared Context Graphs for Human-AI Team Science

Sutanay Choudhury, Jeffrey J. Czajka, Lummy M. O. Monteiro, Erin Bredeweg, Jason McDermott, Katherine Wolf, Alex Beliaev, Josh Elmore, Paul Piehowski, Kylee Tate, Yuqian Gao, Aivett Bilbao, Kelly Stratton, Scott Baker, Jaydeep P. Bardhan, Kristin Burnum Johnson, Chris Oehmen, Robert Rallo

Most AI-for-science systems focus on scaling a single reasoning process by using 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 carry different priors, experimental background, tacit knowledge, and domain-trained intuitions. The open problem is therefore not only how to scale models, but how to develop "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 human users and agents work, the system captures important observations and hypotheses, tracks how they relate to the team's evolving knowledge model, and routes them to the person or agent whose next decision they can inform. We evaluate Mycelium through a real-world scientific discovery use case: a biological multi-omics campaign where shared context turned a local analytical finding into a cross-expert mechanistic constraint and ultimately into an experimental design. Finally, we describe networked intelligence as sparse conditional computation over distributed scientific contexts. This framework establishes when a scaled standalone agent is sufficient, and when isolated data and specialized expertise make a networked approach essential.