Faculty Profiles on Halo

A guide for university administrators on how faculty profiles are created, how they power your organization page, and what faculty can do to manage their presence.

How faculty profiles are created

Faculty profiles on Halo are created one of two ways:

1. A faculty member signs up directly. When a researcher joins Halo and associates themselves with your institution, their profile is created from the information they provide.

2. Halo generates a profile automatically. For researchers who haven't joined yet, Halo pulls publication data from OpenAlex and uses AI to build a starting profile on their behalf. These profiles are clearly labeled as unclaimed and AI-summarized until the researcher has reviewed and confirmed theirs.

In both cases, the profile contributes to your organization page — adding to your faculty list, your top industry applications, and your partnering listings tab.

What "AI-summarized" means

The AI reads publication titles and abstracts to identify each researcher's program of work and map it to industry applications from Halo's taxonomy. It does not use full-text papers, grant data, patent filings, or anything outside of OpenAlex data and any input the faculty member provides directly.

Each industry application is assigned a confidence score from 1 to 5. Only applications with a score of 3 or above are displayed publicly, keeping thin or speculative assignments off the page.

Why profiles exist before faculty join

Halo creates AI-summarized profiles by default for two reasons. First, your institution's top industry applications are only meaningful if most faculty are represented — waiting for opt-ins would produce a patchy, incomplete picture. Second, researchers can be found by the right industry teams even before they've actively joined Halo. The unclaimed label makes clear that the profile hasn't been reviewed yet.

What faculty can do

Once a faculty member claims their profile, they can:

• Edit their headline, About statement, and other fields

• Override or add industry applications (faculty selections replace AI-inferred ones and update within five minutes)

• Add missing or additional publications, funding, and patents under Edit Profile

• Use the "report error" button for issues like incorrect publication attribution or disambiguation errors

• Request removal of their profile from public display at any time by contacting support@halo.science

For a faculty-facing walkthrough of getting started on Halo, point your researchers to the Guide for Innovators.

Accuracy and known limitations

Halo evaluates classifier accuracy regularly. Currently, roughly 96% of tags displayed at confidence 3 and above are defensible against the researcher's published work. That said, OpenAlex coverage is variable, and some profiles may reflect only a subset of a researcher's publications. Author disambiguation is also imperfect in rare cases where two researchers share a name. The "report error" button on every profile is the fastest way to flag these issues.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Are unclaimed profiles visible to industry partners?

Yes. Unclaimed profiles appear on Halo, on your institution's organization page, and on the industry application directory pages where they've been classified. They're labeled as unclaimed so anyone viewing them knows they haven't been confirmed by the researcher.

Q: How does Halo decide which industry applications to assign?

The AI maps each researcher's published work to industry applications based on the end-use of the research, not just keywords or methodology. The mapping reflects where the work could be deployed in practice rather than the underlying methods or vocabulary used in the research.

Q: Why is one faculty member classified under a different area than a colleague, even though they work on similar things?

Classification is per-researcher and based on each person's own publication trail. Two researchers in the same lab can end up with different applications if their published outputs emphasize different end-use contexts. The fastest fix is for the faculty member to claim their profile and update their applications directly.

Q: A faculty member's publication record looks incomplete. What should they do?

Halo sources publications from OpenAlex, which has variable coverage. After claiming their profile, faculty can add missing or additional publications, funding, and patents directly under Edit Profile.

Q: Can faculty see why they were classified under a specific area?

The AI produces reasoning for each classification, but this isn't currently shown on the public profile.

Q: Does Halo sell researcher data?

No. Halo's purpose is helping industry R&D teams find and connect with academic researchers. Profiles are publicly visible on Halo so researchers can be discovered for partnership conversations, but Halo does not license or sell researcher data to third parties.

Q: How do I get my faculty onboarded quickly?

Halo can provide easy-claim links for all faculty who have AI-summarized profiles. These can be sent to you to distribute however works best for your institution, or Halo can send them directly to faculty once you've given them a heads-up. Reach out to support@halo.science to get started.