Understanding the interface
A quick tour of the main areas of Theo Collaborator:
Left sidebar: your session navigation. Use it to move within the sessions, add Sources, reference Artifacts in the Lineage, or find your way back to the Session Explorer page.
Chat: the center of the screen, and the main way you interact with Theo: ask questions, refine the direction, discuss previous results, reference available sources or artifacts, or request a specialized research phase.
You do not need to move through a fixed workflow. A straightforward question may be answered directly, while a larger research task may use one or more phases, tools, or models.
Right-hand panel: opens to show the Phase UI whenever a scientific phase runs. This is where you'll see findings, sources, analyses, and other outputs. At the top, you’ll see capabilities you can manually invoke instead of asking Theo in chat.
Theo’s main workspace areas have different roles:
Area | Purpose |
Chat | Direct and coordinate the research |
Phase UI | Review detailed work from a specialized workflow |
Sources | Provide inputs and research context |
Artifacts | Store reusable outputs created by Theo |
Lineage | Trace the history and relationships of research steps |
Writing an effective request in chat
State the goal: what do you want to understand, decide, calculate, or produce?
Provide context: identify the field, system, assumptions, constraints, or audience.
Point to inputs: name the sources or artifacts Theo should use.
Describe the output: request a review, comparison, derivation, code file, table, or concise recommendation.
Add quality criteria: specify recency, evidence standards, validation checks, or important exclusions.
Example: “Using the three papers in Sources, compare surrogate-modeling methods for applied physics.” “Check available literature on surrogate modeling and run a simple python code for a physics based surrogate model to support crash analysis”
Review results in the Phase UI
The Phase UI displays structured output from a specialized phase alongside the broader conversation. Depending on the result, it may include findings, analyses, computations, tables, figures, references, and resulting artifacts.
Use the Concise and Detailed controls to change the level of detail. Phase outputs can be downloaded in the formats offered by the interface, such as PDF, Markdown, or JSON.
Central Chat remains the place to discuss the result, request revisions, add context, or decide what happens next.