CIF: EAGER: Towards an Information Theory of Attention

信息理论提出了通信系统性能的理想，几十年来推动了技术的发展。电话和互联网等技术的成功现在使个人能够可靠地接收大量信息。事实上，当今社会面临的一个主要问题是信息太多而不是太少：信息过载问题。丰富的信息造成了人类注意力的稀缺，需要同时考虑信息和注意力的工程设计。然而，问题不仅是技术性的，而且从根本上讲是社会技术性的，解决方案需要明确考虑人类行为。这项早期概念探索性研究的目的是了解在沟通中注意力的获得和损失，利用人的数学模型。该计划首先考虑信息速率和贝叶斯惊喜之间的基本权衡，贝叶斯惊喜是人类注意力的心理测量，在定时信道和多路访问和多播设置建模后的社交媒体系统。该计划接下来考虑当接收者可能会失去注意力时，无论是因为“疲惫不堪”还是因为没有足够的惊讶，最好的沟通方式。还将开发在通道上获得最佳保真度的方法。该项目与同样注重关注的教育/外联计划相结合，旨在向未来的学院灌输参与文化。将为整个校园的本科生编写关于大数据和英雄工程学的新课程的教育材料。公众宣传将利用提案人的媒体存在和IEEE的倡议。拟议的工作将奠定新的基础，为社会技术系统的信息理论，带来数学的严谨性和关注的基本限制的问题和信息系统，在社会中变得越来越突出：问题，必须免除假设，人类可以抽象了。其意义在于引入了一个新的层面，沟通，注意，其重要性在信息理论的条款仍然没有开发。预计这将导致在各种网络设置中的信息和惊喜之间的新的权衡，以及在存在噪声和信号相关故障的情况下的通信的新配方，提供使用有限块长度的可靠通信的具体配方。

Information theory has set forth ideals of communication system performance that have driven technological development for decades. Successes in technologies like telephony and the Internet now allow an individual to reliably receive a great deal of information. Indeed, a major problem facing society today is too much information rather than too little: the problem of information overload. A wealth of information creates a scarcity of human attention and a need for engineering designs that consider both information and attention. Problems, however, are not just technical in scope but fundamentally socio-technical, with solutions requiring explicit consideration of human behavior. This early-concept exploratory research aims to understand the gain and loss of attention in communication, drawing on mathematical models of people. The plan first considers the fundamental trade-off between information rate and Bayesian surprise, a psychological measure of human attention, over timing channels and in multiple-access and multicast settings modeled after social media systems. The plan next considers the best ways to communicate when the receiver may lose attention, either by getting "worn out" or by not being surprised enough. Methods to obtain the best fidelity over channels that die will also be developed. the project integrates with an education/outreach plan also focused on attention, which aims to inculcate a culture of engagement in the college of the future. Educational materials for undergraduates across campus, in new courses on big data and on heroic engineering will be developed. Public outreach will draw on the proposer's media presence and IEEE initiatives.The proposed work will lay new foundations for an information theory of socio-technical systems that brings mathematical rigor and concern for fundamental limits to problems and information systems that are becoming increasingly prominent in society: problems that must dispense with the assumption that humans can be abstracted away. The significance lies in the introduction of a new dimension to communication, attention, whose importance in information-theoretic terms remains untapped. This is expected to lead to novel trade-offs between information and surprise in various network settings, as well as novel formulations of communication in the presence of both noise and signal-dependent failure, providing concrete formulations of reliable communication using finite block lengths.