Attention-Sensitive Alerting

Understand

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.