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Searching and exploring online is a part of our everyday lives – shaping how we learn, work and innovate. However, today, people are still drowning in information, with few mechanisms for managing or synthesizing large volumes of disparate information. It is a struggle to find the right information or identify relevant unknown unknowns for those who lack knowledge of a particular domain or well-defined goals. Even experts juggle dozens of disparate information silos spread out across different apps, websites, and work sessions. This is cognitively overwhelming and time-consuming, preventing people from developing a comprehensive understanding, gaining deep insights, and achieving their creative potential. This is especially true in complex creative information work like scientific research, founding a startup or innovating to protect the public during a pandemic.As the Web paradigm evolves to include Generative AI models and beyond, we are experiencing a shift in how we search, learn, work and create. With this transformation in human-AI interaction, it is important to investigate how we might present the user with the right information in the right context, the right representation, and at the right time. This thesis explores this in the context of cognitively complex information work (such as knowledge discovery, synthesis, and creativity). It presents two types of contributions: (1) Empirical studies that further our understanding of how people explore, make sense of, and create using information on the Web. The studies follow a mixed-methods approach, combining large-scale and longitudinal quantitative data analysis with in-depth qualitative inquiry. (2) Computational and interaction techniques that augment these cognitive processes by seamlessly integrating knowledge from the Web into the user’s work context.Each study observes user behavior, challenges, and strategies at different stages of information exploration, sensemaking, and creative processes. Each system introduces an approach for inferring contextual signals from user-generated artifacts. For example, such as CoNotate mines an individual’s unstructured artifacts for knowledge gaps and patterns to make query suggestions, InterWeave analyzes and presents suggestions in the user’s evolving sensemaking structures to present suggestions, Relatedly mines existing knowledge structures on the web from previous users to present dynamic topic overviwes, and Amethyst enables users with affordances to specify and refer to personal, projectlevel, and external contexts. User evaluation studies demonstrate how these techniques, mining rich contextual signals from work done during cognitive processes, can promote information exploration, synthesis, and creativity.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Conversational Visual Analytics (CVA) by enabling data analysis through natural language. However, evaluating LLMs for CVA remains a challenge: requiring programming expertise, overlooking real-world complexity, and lacking interpretable metrics for multi-format (visualizations and text) outputs. Through interviews with 22 CVA developers and 16 end-users, we identified use cases, evaluation criteria and workflows. We present Lexara, a user-centered evaluation toolkit for CVA that operationalizes these insights into: (i) test cases spanning real-world scenarios; (ii) interpretable metrics covering visualization quality (data fidelity, semantic alignment, functional correctness, design clarity) and language quality (factual grounding, analytical reasoning, conversational coherence) using rule-based and LLM-as-a-Judge methods; and (iii) an interactive toolkit enabling experimental setup and multi-format and multi-level exploration of results without programming expertise. We conducted a two-week diary study with six CVA developers, drawn from our initial cohort of 22. Their feedback demonstrated Lexara's effectiveness for guiding appropriate model and prompt selection.

Context is critical for meaningful interactions between people and Generative AI (GenAI). Yet mainstream tools offer limited means to orchestrate it, particularly across workflows that span multiple interactions, sessions, and models, as often occurs in creative projects. Re specifying prior details, juggling diverse artifacts, and dealing with context drift overwhelm users, obscure intent, and curtail creativity. To address these challenges, we present Orchid, a system that gives its users affordances to specify, reference, and monitor context throughout evolving workflows. Specifically, Orchid enables users to (1) specify context related to the project, themselves, and different styles, (2) reference these via explicit mentions, inline selection, or implicit grounding, and (3) monitor context assigned to different interactions across the workflow. In a within-subjects study (n=12), participants using Orchid to execute creative tasks (compared to a baseline toolkit of web search, LLM-based chat, and digital notebooks) produced more novel and feasible outcomes, reporting greater alignment between their intent and the AI's responses, higher perceived control, and increased transparency. By prioritizing context orchestration, Orchid offers an actionable step toward next generation GenAI tools that support complex, iterative workflows - enabling creators and AI to stay aligned and augment their creative potential.

Conversational interfaces are increasingly used for data analysis, enabling data workers to express complex analytical intents in natural language. Yet, these interactions unfold as long, linear transcripts that are misaligned with the iterative, nonlinear nature of real-world analyses. Revisiting and summarizing conversations for different contexts is therefore challenging. This paper investigates how data workers navigate, make sense of, and communicate prior analytical conversations. To study behaviors beyond those supported by standard interfaces (i.e., scrolling and keyword search), we develop a design probe that supplements analytical conversations with structured elements and affordances (e.g., filtering, multi-level navigation and detail-on-demand). In a user study (n = 10), participants used the probe to navigate and communicate past analyses, fulfilling information needs (recall, reorient, prioritize) through navigation strategies (visual recall, sequential and abstractive) and summarization practices (adding process details and context). Based on these findings, we discuss design implications to support re-visitation and communication of analytical conversations.

People are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) for complex information tasks like academic research or planning a move to another city. However, while they often require working in a nonlinear manner -- e.g., to arrange information spatially to organize and make sense of it, current interfaces for interacting with LLMs are generally linear to support conversational interaction. To address this limitation and explore how we can support LLM-powered exploration and sensemaking, we developed Sensecape, an interactive system designed to support complex information tasks with an LLM by enabling users to (1) manage the complexity of information through multilevel abstraction and (2) seamlessly switch between foraging and sensemaking. Our within-subject user study reveals that Sensecape empowers users to explore more topics and structure their knowledge hierarchically, thanks to the externalization of levels of abstraction. We contribute implications for LLM-based workflows and interfaces for information tasks.

Scholars who want to research a scientific topic must take time to read, extract meaning, and identify connections across many papers. As scientific literature grows, this becomes increasingly challenging. Meanwhile, authors summarize prior research in papers' related work sections, though this is scoped to support a single paper. A formative study found that while reading multiple related work paragraphs helps overview a topic, it is hard to navigate overlapping and diverging references and research foci. In this work, we design a system, Relatedly, that scaffolds exploring and reading multiple related work paragraphs on a topic, with features including dynamic re-ranking and highlighting to spotlight unexplored dissimilar information, auto-generated descriptive paragraph headings, and low-lighting of redundant information. From a within-subjects user study (n=15), we found that scholars generate more coherent, insightful, and comprehensive topic outlines using Relatedly compared to a baseline paper list.

Generative AI has enabled novice designers to quickly create professional-looking visual representations for product concepts. However, novices have limited domain knowledge that could constrain their ability to write prompts that effectively explore a product design space. To understand how experts explore and communicate about design spaces, we conducted a formative study with 12 experienced product designers and found that experts -- and their less-versed clients -- often use visual references to guide co-design discussions rather than written descriptions. These insights inspired DesignWeaver, an interface that helps novices generate prompts for a text-to-image model by surfacing key product design dimensions from generated images into a palette for quick selection. In a study with 52 novices, DesignWeaver enabled participants to craft longer prompts with more domain-specific vocabularies, resulting in more diverse, innovative product designs. However, the nuanced prompts heightened participants' expectations beyond what current text-to-image models could deliver. We discuss implications for AI-based product design support tools.

Generative AI (GenAI) radically expands the scope and capability of automation for work, education, and everyday tasks, a transformation posing both risks and opportunities for human cognition. How will human cognition change, and what opportunities are there for GenAI to augment it? Which theories, metrics, and other tools are needed to address these questions? The CHI 2025 workshop on Tools for Thought aimed to bridge an emerging science of how the use of GenAI affects human thought, from metacognition to critical thinking, memory, and creativity, with an emerging design practice for building GenAI tools that both protect and augment human thought. Fifty-six researchers, designers, and thinkers from across disciplines as well as industry and academia, along with 34 papers and portfolios, seeded a day of discussion, ideation, and community-building. We synthesize this material here to begin mapping the space of research and design opportunities and to catalyze a multidisciplinary community around this pressing area of research.

Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the need for new technology to support the reading process grows. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. The PDF format for sharing research papers is widely used due to its portability, but it has significant downsides including: static content, poor accessibility for low-vision readers, and difficulty reading on mobile devices. This paper explores the question \"Can recent advances in AI and HCI power intelligent, interactive, and accessible reading interfaces -- even for legacy PDFs?\" We describe the Semantic Reader Project, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers. Through this project, we've developed ten research prototype interfaces and conducted usability studies with more than 300 participants and real-world users showing improved reading experiences for scholars. We've also released a production reading interface for research papers that will incorporate the best features as they mature. We structure this paper around challenges scholars and the public face when reading research papers -- Discovery, Efficiency, Comprehension, Synthesis, and Accessibility -- and present an overview of our progress and remaining open challenges.