Appendix: Agent Personas

A research group can give each of its agents a face, a color, and a clear job. That makes a dashboard of agent activity easy to scan: you see at a glance who is working, who is waiting on you, and who is stuck. The seven personas below are a sample team for an EE researcher. Ada is the chief of staff; the other six are specialists who report to Ada, and Ada reports to you.

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Icon	Persona	Role
	Ada (violet)	Chief of Staff. Your personal assistant: maintains your personal knowledge graph, reads and triages your email, manages your calendar, and coordinates the work of every other agent.
	Scout (orange)	Novelty and prior-art search. Searches papers, patents, and code to tell you whether a new idea is really new, and watches your topics for relevant new work.
	Marisol (teal)	Department events and speakers. Runs the seminar and event calendar, and finds, invites, and confirms speakers along with rooms, travel, and hosting.
	Penny (green)	Lab budgets and finance. Tracks grant spending and burn rates, forecasts overruns, and drafts purchase requests and expense reports for your approval.
	Rosa (red)	Grant writing. Finds funding opportunities that fit your research, then drafts, critiques, and tracks proposals through to the submission deadline.
	Pixel (pink)	Presentations and web presence. Builds slide decks, posters, and figures, and keeps your university web page current.
	Kai (yellow)	Conferences and speaking proposals. Tracks calls for papers and deadlines, vets venues, drafts abstracts and talk proposals, and plans travel.

How the team fits together

flowchart TB
    You["You, the researcher"] --> Ada["Ada<br/>Chief of Staff"]
    Ada --> Scout["Scout<br/>Novelty search"]
    Ada --> Marisol["Marisol<br/>Events and speakers"]
    Ada --> Penny["Penny<br/>Budget and finance"]
    Ada --> Rosa["Rosa<br/>Grant writing"]
    Ada --> Pixel["Pixel<br/>Presentations and web"]
    Ada --> Kai["Kai<br/>Conferences"]
    Scout -.-> Rosa
    Penny -.-> Rosa
    Kai -.-> Penny
    Kai -.-> Pixel
    Marisol -.-> Penny

Solid arrows are the reporting line. Dotted arrows are the common hand-offs between specialists, such as Scout's prior-art summary feeding Rosa's proposal. Each sheet lists its own hand-offs and approval rules.

Using the personas on a dashboard

• Ring color. Each avatar gets a ring in its signature color, so a card is recognizable even when the face is small.
• Status badge. Use five states: Idle, Working, Waiting on you, Blocked, and Done. Give each badge its own shape or icon as well as a color, so the status does not depend on color alone.
• Task list. Each card shows the agent's current tasks. The sample tasks in every sheet are illustrative, not real data.
• Approval rules. Every sheet lists what the agent does alone, what it asks first, and what it never does. These follow the book's rule of "trust, but verify": agents draft and prepare, and a human sends, submits, signs, and pays.

Shared art style

Every image prompt uses the same style line as the Volt mascot: flat vector cartoon, clean lines, solid colors, soft rounded shapes, transparent background, no text in the image, readable at about 90 px. Paste the prompts into the same image-generator conversation so the seven avatars come out as a consistent set.