Your scientific intuition, made computable.
The best scientists know more than they can articulate. They develop instincts about which results to trust, which methods to rely on, and which findings warrant conviction versus caution. This intuition is the accumulation of years of experimental judgment, and it shapes every decision a lab makes. No existing tool captures it. Apprentice does, and gives it back to you as a collaborator that reasons about your science the way you do.
The Research Record
Everything you've done, stated, and published.
Structured and connected.
This is where the profile begins. CORTEX ingests a researcher's publications, methods sections, experimental logs, and datasets, and builds a structured map of their scientific footprint: the research programs they've pursued, the hypotheses they've tested, the techniques they've used, the collaborators they've worked with. Think of it as a complete, searchable history of a researcher's scientific life, a connected web of decisions and discoveries.
The Method Signature
Not just which techniques you use. Which ones you trust.
Every researcher has methods they rely on and methods they treat with caution. The Method Signature captures this distinction by analyzing how each technique actually appears in a researcher's work: Is it their primary evidence or a supplementary check? Do they describe it with confidence or hedge the results? Have they refined the protocol over time or adopted it recently? The result is a calibrated profile of methodological commitment: what this researcher actually bets their conclusions on.
The Epistemic Fingerprint
How you reason. Your personal rules of evidence, made explicit.
Two researchers can look at the same data and reach different conclusions. Not because one is wrong, but because they apply different standards of proof. One researcher requires three independent validations before stating a mechanism. Another moves from correlation to hypothesis faster but designs more falsification experiments. The Epistemic Fingerprint captures these researcher-specific reasoning patterns: what counts as sufficient evidence, how they move from observation to claim, and what inferential rules they apply that no one else in their field necessarily shares.
The Belief Map
What you currently hold to be true, and how confident you are in each piece.
The Belief Map is a living model of a researcher's current scientific worldview. Every active hypothesis, every established conclusion, every open question, weighted by how settled each one is. It updates automatically as new results come in, and it's shaped by the Method Signature: a result from a technique the PI deeply trusts moves the needle more than one from a method they've always hedged on. When new data arrives, CORTEX doesn't just store it. It shows you how it should shift what you believe.
Core Capabilities
that modern biology deserves.
