jusjinuk/research-brainstorm

Research Brainstorming

When to use

• User says "what could we do next based on this paper?"
• User asks for research directions, follow-ups, or extensions
• User wants to identify gaps in existing work

Workflow

1. Understand the paper deeply before brainstorming

   • What's the core contribution? What's actually new?
   • What assumptions does it rely on?
   • What did they NOT do, and why?
   • What are the stated limitations?

2. Identify gaps from multiple angles:

   • Methodology: can the approach be applied to different domains/modalities?
   • Scale: does it work at 10x/100x the tested scale?
   • Assumptions: what happens when key assumptions are relaxed?
   • Combination: can this be combined with orthogonal recent work?
   • Failure modes: where does the method break down?

3. Generate 3-5 concrete research directions, each with:

   • One-line description: specific and actionable
   • Gap: what's missing in the current work that this addresses
   • Approach sketch: 2-3 sentences on how you'd actually do it
   • Feasibility: easy (weeks, existing tools) / moderate (months, some new infrastructure) / hard (6+ months, fundamental challenges)
   • Resources needed: data, compute, specific expertise

4. Quality bar: every idea must be specific enough to start working on

   • Bad: "improve the model's performance"
   • Bad: "apply to other domains"
   • Good: "replace the cross-attention in the fusion module with a mixture-of-experts gate, since the current design scales quadratically with the number of modalities — test on the AudioSet + ImageNet joint benchmark"

5. Prioritize by the intersection of novelty and feasibility — the best ideas are those that are clearly doable and clearly haven't been done

Formatting for Slack

• Number the ideas
• Bold the one-line description
• Keep feasibility assessments honest — don't oversell
• If an idea requires specific expertise the lab may not have, say so