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"What Are You Really Trying to Do?": Co-Creating Life Goals from Everyday Computer Use

arxiv.org/abs/2605.00497

Updated 51 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294GQ0V5ARWMG25T60ZPSGC

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 51 min ago
arXiv
2605.00497
T1 · 51 min ago
Category
cs.HC
T1 · 51 min ago

Abstract

-cross Abstract: Recent advances in user modeling make it feasible to conduct open-ended inference over a person's everyday computer use. Despite longstanding visions of systems that deeply understand our actions and the purposes they serve in our lives, existing systems only capture what a person is doing in the moment, not why they are doing it, limiting these systems to surface-level support. We introduce striving co-creation, a process for inferring broader life goals from unstructured observations of computer use. Grounded in Activity Theory and Emmons' personal strivings framework, our system progressively constructs a hierarchical representation of a person's activities. Strivings are, however, difficult to fully resolve from observation alone, as the same action can be driven by many different goals. Our system therefore supports an editing interface that gives people agency over how they are understood by the system, feeding their corrections back into subsequent rounds of striving induction. In a week-long field deployment (N=14), we find that our co-creation process produces strivings that participants recognize as representative of their long-term goals and gives them greater agency than baseline methods.

Authors 6

Shardul Sapkota, Matthew J\"orke, Zane Sabbagh, Omar Shaikh, Grace Wang, James A. Landay

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
replace

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

arXiv id
2605.00497

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Categories
cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

DOI
10.1145/3830398.3830630

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.HC

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 51 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

10

Source tiers

T110

Freshest observation

51 min ago

Conflicts

None