Everything you need to know about the "Sensemaking and AI 2026: Uses, Behaviors, Design, and Recommendations "
Workshop at CHI 2026 in Barcelona (Spain).
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A workshop on how sensemaking is being changed by AI
How people are making sense of their world. What are the tools, processes, methods, results.
What role do AI tools have to play?
Date: Monday, April 13.
Date: Monday, April 13.
Time: Half-day, afternoon.
Time: Half-day, afternoon.
Call for Presentations (CfP) - How to participate
Call for Presentations (CfP) - How to participate
Submission Details
Submission Details
Format: 2-4 page paper in 2 column SIGCHI format
Content: Including but not limited to: proof of concepts, preliminary results, or positions. The main requirement is that your submission prepares you with an idea to bring to the workshop.
Review Process: Submissions are lightly reviewed by the workshop organizers for thematic match and capacity to add to discussion at the workshop.
Audience: Submissions are encouraged from junior and senior researchers from HCI, AI, and any field relevant to sensemaking.
Contact: dmrussell@gmail.com
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This workshop will focus on the most recent work in sensemaking, the activities, technologies and behaviors that people do when making sense of their complex information spaces.
We are seeking submissions from interested authors who can present their work in sensemaking. This can be case studies of sensemaking behavior, analyses of tools that people use for sensemaking, or position papers about how sensemaking should be working in an ideal world.
The workshop will have presentations from accepted papers in the first half, and then a group effort to understand this field and how it's evolving.
The workshop is scheduled to be held during the week of CHI 2026, and will be an afternoon event.
To submit a paper, please contact the workshop coordinator, Daniel M. Russell at dmrussell@gmail.com with your idea for submission. If you've got a paper that you'd like to submit, please click on this link to formally submit your proposed paper to the workshop.
We will only accept as many papers as will fit into the program, so we anticipate this to be somewhat competitive. We also expect to let authors know about acceptance by March 15. Note that CHI Early Registration closes 2 weeks later on April 1.
We're especially interested in the ways in which sensemaking practices will be affected by the latest wave of AI methods. We're looking for an understanding of How can AI help in sensemaking?
Paper Proposal Submission Deadline: February 28, 2026. We will notify authors of acceptances by March 15, 2026.
Please click on this link to formally submit your proposed paper to the workshop.
The Workshop will be held during the week of CHI 2026 (<exact place TBD> Link to Map of room location)
Plan for the workshop
Plan for the workshop
Master plan: We'll share our work with short presentations to the entire meeting until the first coffee break in the afternoon. As we've done in earlier workshops, we'll have 3 sessions with papers grouped by topic. Each hour-long session will have presentations + discussions. We'll then break into subgroups to work on specific sensemaking topics before regrouping to merge and share our insights. (See agenda plan below.)
Agenda
Agenda
- Introductions
- Quick round of topic elicitation
- Merging / discussion of topics
- Readout -- summary presentations of sensemaking topics
Participant Papers
Participant Papers
AI Boundary Objects for Agonistic Participation: Lessons from a Pilot Workshop (Eric Gianet)
Search Whisperer: Bridging the Syntax–Concept Gap in AI-Augmented Search Sensemaking (Henk van Ess)
Sensemaking Against the Drafter: AI-Powered Perspective Contrast for Everyday Legal Documents (Henk van Ess)
GenAI methods for sensemaking of complex concept spaces (Daniel M. Russell)
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Laura Koesten
Laura Koesten
Laura Koesten is an assistant professor at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE, and affiliated with the University of Vienna, Austria and the AIT, Austria.
Her research focuses on improving human-data interaction by exploring data-centric sensemaking with data and visualizations, data discovery and reuse, as well as the ethical and collaborative aspects of data-centric work. She is the Principal Investigator of the WWTF Digital Humanism project Talking Charts and the recipient of the 2024 Hedy Lamarr Prize awarded by the City of Vienna, Austria. She earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton, UK, in collaboration with the Open Data Institute, London, UK.
Daniel M. Russell
Daniel M. Russell
I am a traveling scholar. As such I write, lecture, and create materials for teaching. Sometimes this includes videos, short podcasts, tech reports, sometimes papers for scientific publication, and sometimes books for everyone.
I'm a practicing scientist. That means I experiment and I analyze. I do field studies and I try to understand what makes online researchers tick.
Why do they sometimes query Google for [ first ], and then not click on anything? Why do some Google users only ask one query, while others can go on and on?
This is what drives my work: How do people make sense of the data they find? What do people search for? How do they do it? How do they understand and use what they've found.
Aniket Kittur
Aniket Kittur
Niki is an Associate Professor and Cooper-Siegel Chair in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research explores a future that scales sensemaking beyond the limits of a single individual’s mind by: (1) distributing sensemaking among many people and machines; (2) enabling people to build on the sensemaking that others have already done; and (3) seamlessly integrating human and machine cognition to make sense of large information spaces. He is also a co-founder of DataSquid, a startup that supports sensemaking by bringing the power of intuitive touch and physics to data visualization.
Regina Schuster
Regina Schuster
Regina Schuster is a PhD student at the University of Vienna in the Research Group for Visualization and Data Analysis. She obtained her MSc in Business Informatics at the University of Vienna and her BSc in Business Administration and Human Resource Management and Education at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. She is interested in how data visualizations are used in everyday news sources and how people make sense of them.
Map of the Convention Center (LINK to overview map)
Notes from the workshop: Sensemaking Collective Notes. Collected slides from Tables.
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