Attention-Sensitive Alerting

Eric Horvitz, Andy Jacobs, David Hovel

Adaptive Systems and Interaction
Microsoft Research
Redmond, Washington 98052-6399

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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.

Keywords: User modeling, models of attention, Bayesian network models, human-computer interface, intelligent agents, probability, decision theory, attentional user interface (AUI) alerting, notifications.

In: Proceedings of UAI '99, Conference on Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence, Stockholm, Sweden, July 1999. Morgan Kaufmann: San Francisco. pp. 305-313.

Author Email: horvitz@microsoft.com

Photo of core AUI Notification Platform team (Left to right: D. Hovel, E. Horvitz, C. Kadie, A. Jacobs, June 2000.)

Related Background

• Overview of the Attentional User Interface (AUI) research at Microsoft Research: "Models of Attention in Computing and Communications: From Principles to Applications," Communications of the ACM 46(3), March 2003.
  
  
• Red Herring article on the Priorities and Notification Platform projects.
  
  
• Article on presentation at ACM Conference (with Steve Ballmer), Stephen Buel, Techweb News, March 2001.
  
  
• Bill Gates keynote at CTIA Wireless Conference, including live demonstration of the Priorities system.
  
  
• Presentation of Notification Platform, CHI 2001 Keynote talk by Bill Gates, Seattle, April 2001. CHI 2001 photo. Video of presentation (higher quality or smaller/lower quality).
  
  
• Paper on the Lumiere project
  
  
• News story on Attentional User Interface (AUI) project at Microsoft Research: "Microsoft Sees Software Agent as Way to Avoid Distractions", John Markoff, New York Times, July '00.
  
  
• Article on Notification Platform and Priorities work, Michael Hiltzik, MIT Technology Review, March '02.
  
  
• Article on sensing cell phones, MIT Technology Review, March 2002.
  
  
• OMM: Mantra for Mobile Devices, Rob Knies, July 2005.
  
  
• Lumiere project on Bayesian user modeling.
  
  
• Lookout project on principles of mixed-initiative user interaction.
  
  
• IEEE Intelligent Systems (March, April '98) article on research at Microsoft Research (.pdf file, read with Acrobat viewer; article copyright IEEE Intelligent Systems 1998, used with permission.).