reTorHub

An app for connecting people when they want and how they want.

Open the app Invite only, while it is being built.

The idea

The time is the last thing to decide, not the first

Booking a room and hoping is the wrong way round. Most gatherings do not need a particular hour — they need enough of the right people, free at the same time, before the moment passes.

So a reTor does not start with a time. It starts with a condition, written the way you would say it out loud:

“Once five people have said yes and we can all find an hour, any time in the next fortnight.” The condition is the schedule. Nobody picks a slot.

From there it is an optimisation problem over real calendars, and reTorHub treats it as one — searching for the arrangement of people and hours that satisfies the most conditions at once, rather than filling the first slot that fits.

None of this needs a calendar connected. Say your usual hours once, in your profile, and every offer stays inside them — still a yes-or-no each time, never a booking that arrives unannounced. “Once five people confirm, any weekday afternoon” works the same way as “need four more for ranked flex, any evening after 8.” Connecting a calendar only matters if you would rather reTorHub caught the clashes for you.

Your feed

Ranked by what you are actually interested in

Every reTor is scored against you personally. Interest is a semantic comparison — your stated interests and the expertise read from your CV, against what the reTor is about — so “neural nets” finds a talk on deep learning without either of you having agreed on a keyword. Availability is read from your calendar. The two combine, weighted toward interest:

Introduction to Machine Learning Practise · Online · Thu 18:30 INTEREST 87% AVAILABILITY 70% 0.6 × interest + 0.4 × availability OVERALL 80%
The breakdown is shown, not hidden: you can see why something is near the top, and a reTor you cannot attend is greyed rather than removed — being told what you are missing is more useful than pretending it is not there.

How a reTor happens

  1. 01Someone proposes it A talk to practise, a finished one to deliver, a problem to think through together, or an outing. Plus the condition that decides when it fires.
  2. 02Calendars — or your hours — come in Connect Outlook or Google and it reads your calendar to find the hours you are free. It asks for read access only and can change nothing in your diary. Say in plain words when you would rather not meet, and that counts too.
  3. 03The matcher runs It searches for the arrangement of people and hours that satisfies the most conditions at once, and checks its own answer for clashes before anyone hears about it.
  4. 04You get a proposal, not a booking An email with an hour and a link to say yes or no. Nothing is in your diary yet, and declining is expected — it is a signal, not a failure.
  5. 05It books when it ripens Only when the condition is genuinely met by real replies does the reTor become a fixed time. Until then it is still looking.

Where things stand

An experiment in agents as personal assistants

reTorHub is an experimental project on agents as personal assistants for humans. The arranging — reading conditions, calendars and replies, and proposing the hour — is done by software acting on your behalf, and what is left for you is to say yes or no. It is a working prototype rather than a finished product, used by a small group.

Workspaces keep separate worlds separate: a university and a company sharing one account never see each other's gatherings. Accounts are created from an invite, which is also what decides where you land — if you have an invite link, it will take you where you need to go.

If you are interested, in using it or in the research behind it, email Filippos Ventirozos at f.ventirozos@mmu.ac.uk.