Research infrastructure

What it does

Serre maps a research field from the papers themselves and ties every judgment to a quoted passage. It judges research directions on the evidence before we commit to one, and records each decision with the evidence it rested on, so it can be checked later. It also tracks every venue and deadline the lab works toward.

Modules

Two shared services and four modules. The services and Compass are in closed testing; the other modules are planned.

LibraryShared serviceIn closed testing

The corpus: papers, their full text, and the claims they make, each tied to the passage it comes from. Searchable. It harvests a field through citations, reads its core in full, extracts quoted claims, searches works and passages, and holds the public OpenReview reviews the venue reviewer reads.

CalendarShared serviceIn closed testing

Venues and their deadlines, each date with its source. It keeps the venue registry and its deadlines, each date with its source and status.

CompassModuleIn closed testing

Decides which line of research to pursue, on the evidence the Library holds, and records the decision with that evidence. It shapes concepts, runs the gauntlet, ranks, writes dossiers, records decisions and builds the submission plan. Topic maps and directions generated from the literature are planned.

LabModulePlanned

Runs experiments planned in advance and stores their results as evidence. Not built yet.

PressModulePlanned

Writes papers in which every claim links to its evidence. Not built yet.

ReviewModulePlanned

Reviews our own drafts before they are submitted. Not built as a module yet. The gauntlet's proof audit and venue review are in Compass.

From idea to paper

Every line of research in Serre is a concept. A concept keeps one record from its first sentence to the published paper and after: its plan, the judgments made about it, and in time its experiments, drafts, submissions and reviews.

A concept moves through stages: seed, shaped, judged, committed, designed, running, evidenced, drafting, reviewed, submitted, under review, accepted, camera-ready and published. Some moves are gates, and a gate needs a decision on the record. The gates that commit resources or a submission need a person. A rejection is not an end: the reviews come back as evidence for the next decision, to revise, retarget, park or kill.

Every move is an entry in an append-only log, with the evidence it rested on and who made it. The history of a paper is one query, and a decision can be checked years later against exactly what it saw.

Today Serre carries a concept from seed to the commit gate and plans its submission. The stages after commitment arrive with Lab, Press and Review.

Compass

Compass decides what to work on. It puts each research direction through a gauntlet of separate judgments, ranks the survivors against each other, and plans where and when to submit them.

Mapping a field

A field starts from seed papers. Serre follows their citations, reads the core of the field in full and records what each paper claims, each claim with its quote.

Judging a direction

A concept is shaped into a thesis, hypotheses, the smallest experiment that would decide it and the results that would kill it. Then a novelty search, a feasibility check, an audit of its formal claims and a review at each candidate venue judge it, each as its own step.

Planning submissions

Judged concepts are ranked by comparing them in pairs. The plan places them at venues whose deadlines they can meet, with a fallback if a paper is rejected.

How Compass judges a direction

Library and Calendar

Two shared services hold the evidence every module reads.

Library

Papers come from arXiv, Semantic Scholar and OpenReview. The core of a field is read from its LaTeX source, or from the PDF when there is none, and split into passages. Every claim taken from a paper carries the exact quote it rests on, and a claim whose quote cannot be found in the text is rejected. Search combines word matching with paper embeddings, and can be run as of a past date.

Calendar

Venues, their editions and deadlines, drawn from ccf-deadlines and OpenReview with the lab's own additions. Every date is marked official, announced or projected, and carries its source and the time it was last checked. A projected date is always labelled as one.

The app

The app is Compass's working surface in the browser. It shows concepts by stage, each concept's plan, gauntlet run and assessments, the decision waiting at its gate, its dossier, the submission plan, upcoming deadlines, and the jobs and model calls behind them as they run. Testers sign in with GitHub.

Closed testing