Tau Intelligence — website

τ — Trustworthy Autonomy under Uncertainty. Static, dependency-free site for a research group working on reinforcement learning, world models, and robotics. Hosted on GitHub Pages.

This repository is the website. There is no build step. Open index.html in a browser and it works.

---

Pages

Page	What it is
index.html	Home. Hero with an interactive 3D armillary scene (Three.js, no build).
research.html	Publications, filtered by venue, searchable.
blogs.html	Technical writings (Markdown + PDF + external links).
about.html	About + contact.
blog.html	Single-post viewer (?slug=…). Renders Markdown or embeds PDF.

The whole site shares one stylesheet (assets/css/style.css) whose colour tokens come straight from the company logo (warm copper, cream, near-black). Re-theme by editing the :root block.

---

Adding content

A new blog post — Markdown (recommended)

1. Create blogs/my-post.md with YAML frontmatter:

   ---
   title: My post title
   date: 2025-04-12
   author: Your Name
   tags: [world-models, RL]
   summary: One-sentence teaser.
   ---
   
   # Body…

2. Push. The GitHub Action regenerates content/blogs.json and the post appears on blogs.html. To preview locally first, run:

   python3 scripts/generate_manifest.py

A new blog post — PDF

1. Drop the file: blogs/my-talk.pdf

2. (Optional) add a sidecar blogs/my-talk.json with metadata:

   {
     "title":  "My talk title",
     "date":   "2025-04-12",
     "author": "Your Name",
     "tags":   ["talks"],
     "summary": "What the talk is about."
   }

3. Push. Done.

A new publication

Edit content/papers.json and add an entry. Paper metadata is too rich to infer from a filename, so this is intentionally manual:

{
  "title": "…",
  "authors": ["A", "B"],
  "venue": "NeurIPS",
  "year": 2025,
  "tags": ["RL", "world models"],
  "abstract": "…",
  "links": {
    "pdf": "papers/my-paper.pdf",
    "arxiv": "https://arxiv.org/abs/…",
    "code": "https://github.com/…",
    "project": "https://…"
  }
}

If you want to host the PDF too, drop it in papers/.

---

Local preview

No toolchain required:

# Any static server. Python's built-in works fine.
python3 -m http.server 8080
# then open http://localhost:8080

(Opening index.html directly with file:// mostly works, but the JSON fetch() calls used by the research/blog loaders need an HTTP origin — use the server.)

---

Deploying to GitHub Pages

1. Push this repo to GitHub.
2. Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source → "GitHub Actions".
3. Push to main. The workflow at .github/workflows/deploy.yml will:
   • Run scripts/generate_manifest.py to refresh content/blogs.json.
   • Auto-commit the regenerated manifest (with [skip ci] so it doesn't loop).
   • Publish the entire repo as the GitHub Pages artifact.

Custom domain? Rename CNAME.example to CNAME and put your domain inside it.

---

Repository layout

.
├── index.html              ← Home (3D hero)
├── research.html           ← Publications listing
├── blogs.html              ← Writings listing
├── about.html              ← About + contact
├── blog.html               ← Single-post viewer
│
├── assets/
│   ├── css/style.css       ← Single stylesheet, all theme tokens at top
│   ├── js/
│   │   ├── main.js             ← Nav toggle + reveal-on-scroll
│   │   ├── three-hero.js       ← Interactive 3D hero (Three.js, ESM CDN)
│   │   ├── research-loader.js  ← Renders papers from content/papers.json
│   │   ├── blogs-loader.js     ← Renders writings from content/blogs.json
│   │   └── blog-viewer.js      ← Renders Markdown / embeds PDF
│   └── img/
│       ├── logo.svg            ← Fallback τ mark
│       └── (drop logo.png here)
│
├── content/
│   ├── papers.json         ← Publications manifest (edit by hand)
│   └── blogs.json          ← Writings manifest (auto-generated)
│
├── blogs/                  ← Drop .md / .pdf files here
│   └── welcome.md          ← Example post
├── papers/                 ← Optional: host paper PDFs here
│
├── scripts/
│   └── generate_manifest.py    ← Scans /blogs → writes content/blogs.json
│
├── .github/workflows/deploy.yml ← Build manifest + publish to Pages
├── .nojekyll                    ← Tells Pages to skip Jekyll
└── CNAME.example                ← Rename to CNAME for a custom domain

---

Theme

All colours are tokens at the top of assets/css/style.css under :root. The defaults are sampled from the logo:

Token	Hex	Role
--primary	#E8722C	Logo orange
--primary-2	#B8541C	Deep copper
--accent	#E9A766	Warm gold highlight
--bg	#0E0D0B	Page background (near-black)
--text	#F2E9D8	Body text (cream)

Change them in one place; the whole site re-themes.

---

The 3D hero

assets/js/three-hero.js loads Three.js from a CDN as a native ES module — no bundler. The scene is a wireframe icosphere wrapped by three orbiting copper rings (a nod to the logo's armillary sphere) inside a warm particle field. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, move the cursor to parallax-nudge the camera. Pauses automatically when off-screen, and silently no-ops if WebGL is unavailable.

To swap the visual for something else (e.g. a Gaussian-splat viewer later), edit just that one file.