Workshop on Human-Centered Proactive and Personalized Agents for Interactive Information Access

As AI agents become more capable of anticipating intent and taking initiative, the ways humans seek, interpret, and act on information are being quietly reshaped. Yet at the heart of every interaction lies a human—curious, uncertain, and contextually situated, whose goals and boundaries cannot be fully captured by data alone. This workshop centers on the human experience of proactivity and personalization in interactive information access, asking how agents can assist without overriding agency, adapt without imposing assumptions, and anticipate without eroding trust. Building on CHIIR’s tradition of bridging information retrieval and human–computer interaction, the workshop will explore when and how proactivity supports human information behavior – enhancing exploration, sense-making, and learning – and when it risks diminishing transparency or control. Through co-design sessions and participatory discussions, we will interrogate concrete design and evaluation dimensions of proactive systems, including timing of initiative, transparency of intent, user control, and their effects on exploration, sense-making, and trust. Ultimately, this workshop seeks to reimagine proactivity not as automation of the search process, but as a collaborative partnership where agents act as companions in the human pursuit of understanding. All resources related to this workshop are available at https://proactive-chiir.github.io/.