Building a research lab in public

Every post here will be designed to stand alone as a research artifact while contributing to a larger, ongoing conversation. Readers can expect rigor, transparency, and a consistent format.

You can expect daily content going forward.

My goal for the week was to start sharing daily research notes over here on nels.ai and getting this section of the research lab back up and running. That seems like a manageable goal and something that should be easy enough to accomplish. The writing approach over here on this online platform is to combine the clarity of structured research with the accessibility of reflective writing. Honestly, that sounds really easy to make happen, but in practice it might be a little bit more difficult to sustain. Every post here will be designed to stand alone as a research artifact while contributing to a larger, ongoing conversation. Readers can expect rigor, transparency, and a consistent format that makes it easy to track ideas across time.

The mission here at nels.ai is to advance understanding of how intelligence operates across machines, systems, and environments. My focus on the interplay between computation, embodiment, and autonomy, while remaining committed to open research, transparent citations, and accessible insights. Generally, I put forward links to academic research that is openly readable and has been shared outside of a paywall. Sometimes you have to share an original source that is behind some type of academic paywall, but I’ll endeavor to keep that to a minimum as we move forward along this journey. Each research note will end up being 3-5 paragraphs of content. I’m going to try to avoid lists of bullet points and massive link drops here as that does not make a contribution outside of curation.

Right now I’m planning to avoid using topic scaffolding based on monthly themes for this ongoing writing project of working toward building a research lab in public. My initial thought was that I would set daily themes based on robotics, quantum, agentic, markets, and technology. That would set up a consistent weekly writing delivery, but it might constrain my coverage and result in backlogs instead of a more real time delivery. I want to focus on being timely instead of delivering on a defined schedule. That should help keep my attention focused on this project. I want to keep it as a more active daily delivery effort where the process produces useful results and is sustainable due to the value of the output.