C4DT Affiliated Professors Tracker

An agentic tracker that follows the research of C4DT's ~40 affiliated professors.

Every weekday a GitHub Actions job picks the least-recently-updated professor (so each is revisited roughly every two months), reads their websites, code repositories, and publication feed, updates that professor's file under professors/, regenerates the index, commits, and announces significant updates to a Matrix channel.

👉 The generated index of all professors is PROFESSORS.md.

Updating

professors.yaml is the source of truth. After editing it (adding URLs, fixing an ORCID, flipping reviewed: true, …), rebuild the index:

devbox run regen-professors     # rebuild PROFESSORS.md from professors.yaml

Do not hand-edit PROFESSORS.md — it is generated and will be overwritten.

Other commands:

devbox run update                    # update the least-recently-updated professor
devbox run update -- --slug <slug>   # update one specific professor
devbox run announce                  # post the last update to Matrix
devbox run resolve-orcids            # fill candidate ORCIDs for review
devbox run bootstrap                 # (re)build the registry from the C4DT labs listing
devbox run test                      # run the unit tests

Recording meeting notes

Use notes to add a dated Notes section to a professor's profile from free-form notes (the LLM extracts the professor name and date automatically):

Privacy: notes are stored in a public repository. Do not include personal information — names of third parties, private contact details, off-the-record remarks, or any sensitive organisational context. Stick to publicly shareable research topics and outcomes.

# Pass text directly — avoid special shell characters (!, backticks) this way:
devbox run notes -- --file - <<'EOF'
Met with Alice Example on 2026-07-10.  She mentioned a new paper on X.
EOF

# Or pipe from another command:
cat notes.txt | devbox run notes -- --file -

# Or read from a file:
devbox run notes -- --file notes.txt

# Override the extracted slug/date if needed:
devbox run notes -- --file - --slug alice-example --date 2026-07-10 <<'EOF'
...
EOF

Local runs that hit the LLM / Firecrawl / Matrix need credentials: copy .env.example to .env and fill it in (.env is gitignored). In CI these come from GitHub Actions secrets and variables.

Identifiers: ORCID and OpenAlex

Publications are tracked via OpenAlex, anchored on each professor's ORCID when available. ORCID is a stable, researcher-curated id; OpenAlex's own author ids are name-clustered and prone to collisions (two people sharing a name, or one person split across records). The daily job falls back to a human-verified OpenAlex author id when there is no ORCID:

orcid	openalex_id	Publication tracking
set	(ignored)	filter by ORCID — preferred; aggregates OpenAlex's duplicate author records
null	set	filter by OpenAlex author id — works, but may miss papers if OpenAlex split the author
null	null	skipped — the professor is still tracked from websites + code

A wrong id is worse than none: it produces confidently-wrong publication feeds. When you can't confirm an id, set it to null. The links in PROFESSORS.md — rendered even for reviewed: false entries — let you click through and verify each ORCID / OpenAlex record quickly.

How it fits together

File / dir	Role
professors.yaml	Registry & rotation source of truth (one entry per professor)
professors/<SLUG>.md	Per-professor profile with a dated changelog
PROFESSORS.md	Generated index (one entry per professor + verification links)
src/prof_tracker/	The updater: registry, sources, agent, render, matrix, CLI
.github/workflows/update.yml	The daily scheduled run

The updater is a plain CLI (devbox run …), so it runs identically locally and in CI, and could move to a server cron unchanged.