Omakase: proactive assistance with actionable suggestions for evolving scientific research projects

As AI agents become increasingly capable of complex knowledge tasks, the lack of context limits their capability to proactively reason about a user's latent needs throughout a long evolving project. In scientific research, many researchers still manually query a deep research system and compress their rich project contexts into short, targeted queries. Further, a deep research system produces exhaustive reports, making it difficult to identify concrete actions. To explore the opportunities of research assistants that are proactive throughout a research project, we conducted several studies (N=42) with a technology probe and an iterative prototype. The latest iteration of our system, Omakase, is a research assistant that monitors a user's project documents to infer timely queries to a deep research system. Omakase then distills long reports into suggestions contextualized to their evolving projects. Our evaluations showed that participants found the generated queries to be useful and timely, and rated Omakase's suggestions as significantly more actionable than the original reports.