🚨[Pls repost!] Agentic AI is stress-testing Explainable AI. We need to fix it. That's why I'm thrilled to announce the 6th Human-Centered Explainable AI (
#HCXAI) workshop at
#CHI2026 in Barcelona! 🚀
🎯 The challenge: LLM-based agents are fundamentally breaking our explainability paradigms. When AI systems plan multi-step strategies, invoke tools, and trigger cascading consequences—what does explainability even mean?
⚡️ Here's the urgency: Without explainability, there can be no accountability. And unaccountable AI leads to automated injustice.
Since 2021, our HCXAI workshops have built a community of 450 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from 21 countries. This year, we're reimagining explainability for agentic systems across the following areas:
1️⃣ Stakeholder Needs: What do users vs. developers actually need to know before, during, and after agent execution?
2️⃣ Explaining Agentic Behavior: Are chain-of-thought traces useful as explanations? How do we explain multi-step plans, tool invocations, and cascading effects?
3️⃣ Trust, Accountability & Failure Modes: How do we support calibrated reliance: appropriate trust vs. dangerous over-reliance? What happens when explanations fail through dark patterns, manipulation, or cognitive overload? What's the difference between excusable AI and explainable AI?
4️⃣ Sociotechnical Evaluation & Futures: How do we move beyond technical metrics to measure real understanding and decision quality? What participatory approaches center affected communities? What should agentic XAI look like in 2030?
We're calling for papers, prototypes, and provocations (position papers, empirical studies, critical reflections, design fictions, system demos) that:
🔥 Challenges assumptions about what constitutes explainability
🚨 Exposes limits, failures, and unintended consequences
🌍 Bridges disciplines: HCI, AI, social science, law, design, domain expertise
🛠️ Proposes novel interaction paradigms or evaluation methods
📝 2-5 page single column papers (excluding refs)
🗓️ Deadline: Feb 19, 2026
🔗
hcxai.jimdosite.com/
🌟 Past participants say HCXAI has become "central to their research practice", not just for the content, but for the authentic community that "preserves connection even as attendance soars past 100."
The systems are being deployed now. The time to figure this out is now.
w/ Justin Weisz, Andreas Riener, Ken Holstein, Min Kyun Lee, Amal Alabdulkarim
👉 Spread the word. Submit your work. See you in Barcelona.