Current search engines are great tools for checking facts and looking up information in situations where the user can easily formulate simple queries that define well the target of the information seeking task, such as “Find restaurants close to a given location” or “Find reviews of a given book”. What search engines are not good at is supporting complex information exploration and discovery tasks that go beyond simple keyword queries. At the Helsinki Institute for Information technology (HIIT), we have been combining for the last few years the efforts of several research groups working in rather distinctive fields, with the goal to create novel information-seeking and sense-making methods and platforms for complex situations where the users may have difficulties in expressing their information needs, and furthermore, where the search intent can change and evolve in an iterative process where human can interact with the new information revealed by the computer. Our approach is based on interactive intent modelling, combining advances in machine learning, information retrieval, visualisation and human-computer interaction, and our belief is that by symbiotically combining the potential of human reasoning and the capability of computers to process vast masses of data, we can better support human cognition and free the researcher’s or knowledge worker’s time for more high-level creative thinking, sense-making and collaboration.