Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This paper introduces Aleena, an open-source alignment agent designed to enhance collaboration in research software engineering by structuring multi-modal interactions across platforms like GitHub. By transforming informal communications and decisions into coherent project records, Aleena addresses the challenge of maintaining alignment among diverse stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle. The key result demonstrates that Aleena effectively tracks project intent and ownership, mitigating the risk of miscommunication and preserving decision continuity in collaborative environments.
Aleena revolutionizes research software collaboration by ensuring that the rationale behind decisions is preserved across diverse communication channels.
Research software collaborations span meetings, informal chats, pull requests, and GitHub issues. A decision surfaced in a Slack thread, refined in a meeting, and implemented in a pull request can lose its original rationale across these artifacts, leaving domain researchers and research software engineers with divergent mental models of project intent, ownership, and scientific assumptions. We argue that alignment in research software engineering is a continuous lifecycle problem, and that agentic AI can support stakeholder alignment and project-state tracking without replacing human decision-making. We present Aleena, an open-source lifecycle alignment agent that uses GitHub as a shared collaboration surface, transforming multi-modal stakeholder interactions into structured project records that surface risks, track open questions, and preserve decision continuity. Grounded in university-based research software engineering center experiences, this paper presents the motivating problem, system design, prototype, and illustrative lifecycle scenarios for Aleena.
