Attention-Sensitive Alerting

Abstract

We introduce utility-directed procedures for mediating the flow of potentially distracting alerts and communications to computer users. We present models and inference procedures that balance the context-sensitive costs of deferring alerts with the cost of interruption. We describe the challenge of reasoning about such costs under uncertainty via an analysis of user activity and the content of notifications. After introducing principles of attention-sensitive alerting, we focus on the problem of guiding alerts about email messages. We dwell on the problem of inferring the expected criticality of email and discuss work on the Priorities system, centering on prioritizing email by criticality and modulating the communication of notifications to users about the presence and nature of incoming email.

Appears in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI1999)

References in corpus (3)

• Empirical Analysis of Predictive Algorithms for Collaborative Filtering
• The Lumiere Project: Bayesian User Modeling for Inferring the Goals and Needs of Software Users
• Display of Information for Time-Critical Decision Making

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Seeing stars: Exploiting class relationships for sentiment categorization with respect to rating scales
• Towards Adjustable Autonomy for the Real World
• Intelligent Notification Systems: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges
• Coordinates: Probabilistic Forecasting of Presence and Availability