Glossary

This page defines the terms used across the HDTwin documentation. Terms are grouped by theme and listed alphabetically within each group.

Core Concepts

Deliberation A simulated focus group or poll run in HDTwin Council: the Human Digital Twins in a panel discuss a topic, vote on statements, and produce an analysed report.

Human Digital Twin (HDT) A synthetic persona — an AI agent that replicates the characteristics, reasoning, and behaviour of a member of a target population. Human Digital Twins are clearly AI-generated and never represent real, identifiable individuals.

Panel A collection of Human Digital Twins representing a target population, built once from research data and reusable for any number of deliberations. Panels are distributed as signed, encrypted .hdt files.

Persona (personality) The compiled, natural-language form of a single Human Digital Twin — the simulation prompt produced by the cognitive-reconstruction pipeline. Used interchangeably with “personality” in the studio documentation.

Products and Tools

HDTwin Council The HDTwin web application in which deliberations happen. Users load a panel, define a topic, and read the analysed report.

HDTwin studio The framework of command-line tools used by certified System Integrators to build panels from source research data. Organised in three tool families: studio-tools (source preparation), studio (cognitive reconstruction), and panel (assembly and packaging).

Habermas Machine The dedicated deliberation engine, configured inside each panel, that executes Council’s deliberations.

LLM gateway The common access point through which the studio tools consume the HDTwin-optimised language models. Access requires an API key issued by HDTwin.

System Integrator A certified professional who designs, builds, validates, and delivers HDTwin panels using HDTwin studio. Certification is obtained by completing the official HDTwin training course.

Data and Formats

.hdt file The compiled, signed, and encrypted distribution format of an HDTwin panel. It is the contract between the two products: whatever studio produces, Council can run.

Evidence The explicit observations and constraints extracted from one source respondent record, used as the input to cognitive reconstruction. Reconstruction distinguishes inference (extending evidence plausibly — permitted) from fabrication (introducing unsupported detail — prohibited).

Latent Cognitive Model (LCM) The reconstructed internal system of a respondent — values, motivations, trust relationships, world model, reasoning style — inferred from the evidence. The LCM, not a paraphrase of the source answers, is the real product of the reconstruction stage.

Seed comments Statements pre-loaded into a deliberation at creation time. The Human Digital Twins take them into account during the discussion and may add further statements of their own.

Source research data The input to panel construction: typically survey microdata (e.g. an SPSS .sav file) or aggregate population statistics from which a synthetic microdataset is first reconstructed.

Analysis and Quality

Bias sterilization HDTwin’s proprietary layer that filters harmful language, corrects stereotypical response distributions, and keeps agents within the logical guardrails of their persona. See Ethics & AI Safety.

Consensum detection The automatic identification of areas of agreement within a panel, even on highly divisive topics. Surfaced in the divisiveness analysis of a deliberation report.

Divisiveness A report metric describing how much consensus or disagreement exists within the panel on a given topic.

Provenance The recorded origin of a data value: observed, derived, assumed, or simulated. These categories must never be conflated — a synthetic value must never be presented as an observed one.