Research agenda

Open questions in observation architecture

If Layer 1 validates — if passive longitudinal observation produces calibrated, target-specific lift beyond the R1 population-prior and R2 own-routine baselines — the next question is how to observe a person continuously over months to years. That is a different optimization problem from any current product. Every question below is answerable with the apparatus already specified: fix the task set, vary the sensing arm, read the evidence-efficiency curve.

Hardware framework Protocol Paper

Version 1.0 — pre-pilot protocol proposal. Synthetic harness only. No human-subject results.

Four clusters

The agenda

Sensing sufficiency

  • What is the minimum sensing needed to model a person well?
  • Which modalities add measurable predictive lift — and which mostly re-encode routine?
  • Is continuous video necessary, or can sparse images match it?
  • How much audio is sufficient before lift saturates?
  • How much context is enough for each transition type?

Sampling & scheduling

  • What capture schedule maximizes predictive information per joule?
  • Can event-triggered sensing outperform continuous sensing?
  • How should missing data be represented so missingness neither leaks the outcome nor biases the forecast?
  • What battery life is necessary before charging gaps censor the evidence that matters?

Compute placement

  • How much local computation is actually required?
  • Can inference happen offline — deferred to a daily upload — without losing time-sensitive evidence?
  • What evidence value is lost to on-device redaction and privacy filtering?
  • What architecture maximizes calibrated skill per watt?

Uncertainty & representation

  • How should sensor error and coverage gaps propagate into the forecast distribution rather than being imputed away?
  • How should a belief state represent what the device did not see?
  • Which derived representations (transcripts, entities, commitments) preserve predictive information, and which discard it?
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Status. These are open research questions, stated as formulation. None has been answered; no experiments have run. The proposed pre-pilot feasibility study (five consenting participants, thirty days, audio-first, daily sealed forecasts) is designed to validate only that the harness can run — it is not powered to answer any question on this page.

Contribute

How to work on these questions

Run the harness

The synthetic reference path exercises the full loop — sealing, resolution, scoring, permutation. Run it.

Run a sensing ablation

Fix the task set, vary the sensing arm (tier, schedule, device), and report Skill vs R1/R2 per arm. The playbook.

Propose an instrument

Evaluate a capture device against the hardware framework: coverage, evidence, research fitness — and pre-register an evidence-efficiency estimate.