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

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: arxiv.org/abs/2605.00497
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2605.00497
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
DOI: 10.1145/3830398.3830630
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2605.00497
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.HC
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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10

Source tiers

T110

Freshest observation

2 h ago

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None

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Authors: Shardul Sapkota, Matthew J\"orke, Zane Sabbagh

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Claim history for PDF
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.00497	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaper"What Are You Really Trying to Do?": Co-Creating Life Goals from Everyday Computer Use
New paper: "What Are You Really Trying to Do?": Co-Creating Life Goals from Everyday Computer Use
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.AI	feed	T1· Official	2 min ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.