| name | researchstack-lab-intake |
| description | Intake skill for new research directions in computer systems, networking, and AI. Use when the user has a
rough idea, partial implementation, benchmark intuition, or venue target and needs to turn it into a clear
paper plan with thesis, hypotheses, workstreams, and next decisions.
|
Lab Intake
Read ../references/workflow.md, ../references/venues.md, ../references/conference-story-patterns.md, and ../references/memory.md.
If this is not a brand-new project, read project memory and researcher preferences first. Pull in only relevant durable context:
- prior thesis definitions,
- venue targets already chosen,
- recurring reviewer risks,
- experiment constraints,
- writing or claim-style preferences.
Produce a compact research brief with:
- Target venue and why it fits.
- Paper type: measurement, mechanism, system, algorithm/control, architecture/co-design, artifact/evaluation, or abstraction.
- One-sentence thesis.
- Core technical bet.
- Assumptions and threat model.
- Required evidence to make the paper believable.
- Highest-risk unknowns.
- Immediate next experiments or reading tasks.
Do not default to an abstraction-centric thesis. If the paper type is "abstraction", explicitly check the Abstraction Gate in conference-story-patterns.md; otherwise prefer a concrete measurement, mechanism, system, control, or artifact framing.
Push the user toward a falsifiable framing. Replace "this seems useful" with:
- what changes,
- for whom,
- under which workloads or conditions,
- relative to which baseline,
- with which metric.
If the idea is too broad, split it into:
- a main contribution that can fit one paper,
- stretch ideas that belong in future work,
- engineering tasks that are necessary but not publication contributions.
When choosing venues, reason from contribution type:
- algorithmic or representation novelty points toward ICLR,
- hardware-software co-design toward ASPLOS,
- large-scale performance engineering toward SC,
- deployable networked systems toward NSDI,
- protocol and network mechanism novelty toward SIGCOMM.
At the end, propose 1 to 3 durable memory entries when the session clarified something future work should inherit, especially:
- the real thesis,
- a venue decision and why,
- a project constraint,
- a killer reviewer risk discovered early.
