CIF: EAGER: Towards an Information Theory of Attention

信息理论提出了通信系统性能的理想，几十年来一直推动着技术的发展。如今，电话和互联网等技术的成功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：信息过载的问题。信息的丰富造成了人类注意力的匮乏，因此需要同时考虑信息和注意力的工程设计。然而，问题不仅仅是技术范围，而且从根本上说是社会技术，解决方案需要明确考虑人类行为。这是一项早期概念探索性研究，旨在利用人的数学模型，了解交流中注意力的得失。该计划首先考虑了信息率和贝叶斯惊讶度之间的基本权衡，贝叶斯惊讶度是衡量人类注意力的一种心理指标，在定时频道和以社交媒体系统为模型的多路访问和多播设置中。接下来，该计划考虑了当接收者可能失去注意力时的最佳沟通方式，要么是“疲惫不堪”，要么是不够惊讶。还将开发在死信道上获得最佳保真度的方法。该项目与教育/推广计划相结合，也注重关注，旨在在未来的大学中灌输一种参与的文化。开发面向全校本科生、大数据、英雄工程等新课程的教材。公众宣传将利用提案人的媒体露面和IEEE的倡议。拟议的工作将为社会技术系统的信息理论奠定新的基础，该理论为社会中日益突出的问题和信息系统带来数学严谨性和对基本限制的关注：这些问题必须摒弃人类可以抽象的假设。其意义在于为交流引入了一个新的维度，即注意力，其在信息论方面的重要性尚未得到开发。这有望在各种网络设置中导致信息和惊喜之间的新颖权衡，以及在噪声和信号相关故障存在下的新颖通信公式，提供使用有限块长度的可靠通信的具体公式。

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.