Report on The 1st Workshop on Human-Centered Proactive and Personalized Agents for Interactive Information Access at CHIIR 2026
TL;DR
A central theme across the workshop was that proactivity should not be understood only as earlier action or improved prediction, but as a form of initiative that must be appropriately timed, transparent, contestable, and aligned with user goals.
Abstract
Interactive information access is increasingly moving beyond reactive query-response paradigms toward agentic systems that can personalize interaction, retain context, infer latent needs, recommend next steps, and initiate support. This shift creates new opportunities for adaptive and context-aware assistance, while also raising important questions about autonomy, privacy, trust, transparency, user welfare, and evaluation. The First Workshop on Human-Centered Proactive and Personalized Agents for Interactive Information Access provided an interdisciplinary forum for examining these questions across information retrieval, human-computer interaction, dialogue systems, AI ethics, cognitive science, learning technologies, and human-centered AI. Through invited talks, paper presentations, and open discussion, the workshop engaged with topics including calibrated initiative, knowledge-gap navigation, long-term memory, value-sensitive design, implicit personalization, AI-mediated care, proactive dialogue, and evaluation beyond task accuracy. A central theme across the workshop was that proactivity should not be understood only as earlier action or improved prediction, but as a form of initiative that must be appropriately timed, transparent, contestable, and aligned with user goals. This report summarizes the workshop and synthesizes the research challenges it surfaced for designing proactive and personalized agents in interactive information access. Date: 26 March 2026. Website: https://proactive-chiir.github.io/index.html.