Research Network

Althea is the user-facing gateway to a coordinated network of agents. For an AI researcher, the important interface is not a dashboard of graph edges or message queues. It is a personal assistant that can recognize when a problem needs outside context, ask for permission when user-derived information needs to leave the local conversation, and route the request through the network.

Why Coordination Matters

AI research is coordination-heavy work. A useful answer often depends on context that lives outside the current chat:

• another researcher has already tried a related experiment;
• a codebase contains the implementation detail that resolves an ambiguity in a paper;
• a prior literature review already narrowed the search space;
• a project, grant, dataset, or benchmark is adjacent to the current question;
• a follow-up should happen later, on email, WhatsApp, or the web app.

Althea is designed to make that coordination a normal part of asking for help. The researcher talks to Althea; Althea decides when it should use tools, run code, read papers, inspect repositories, or consult the agent network.

Network Model

The coordination layer is mediated. Regular user-facing agents do not directly message each other. They communicate through coordinator agents that route and relay requests.

At a high level:

1. You interact with your own Althea agent.
2. Your agent decides that outside help or context may be useful.
3. If user-derived information needs to be shared, Althea asks for consent in ordinary language.
4. After consent, the request is sent to a coordinator-backed network.
5. The coordinator routes the request to an appropriate agent or session.
6. The response is relayed back through your Althea conversation.

The coordinator is not the user interface. It is infrastructure for routing, policy, and relay. The researcher sees the result as part of the normal conversation.

Consent and Control

Coordination is consent-first. Althea should not forward user-derived information to another agent unless consent has been detected.

The consent loop is conversational:

1. Althea explains what it wants to share and why.
2. You approve, deny, or request edits in normal language.
3. Althea classifies that response as consent given, edits requested, consent denied, or no clear signal.
4. Only clear consent allows delivery.

Network membership is also user-controlled. The web app exposes available coordinator-backed networks and lets the user join or leave them. Leaving a network disables that relationship without deleting the underlying historical records needed for auditability and future reactivation.

What Stays Hidden

The network is intentionally not exposed as raw infrastructure. Users do not need to see:

• internal agent IDs;
• coordination message IDs;
• message status transitions;
• raw coordination links;
• coordinator routing decisions.

Althea can expose high-level network membership and ask clear consent questions, but the internal protocol stays behind the assistant interface.

Relationship to Other Althea Capabilities

Coordination is the layer that ties the rest of Althea together:

• Memory and User Info provide the personal context Althea uses to understand who the researcher is and what matters to them.
• Literature Search gathers and synthesizes technical material.
• Code Agent inspects repositories, runs experiments, and verifies claims.
• Tasks and Scheduling monitor the outside world and decide what is relevant.
• Contact Methods keep the agent reachable when coordination needs to continue outside the web app.

The result is a research assistant whose main function is not just answering isolated prompts. Althea keeps context, performs work, and routes attention through the network when the work requires coordination.