Workshop at HCI 2004
The 18th British HCI Group Annual Conference
Leeds Metropolitan University, UK 6-10 September 2004

 Workshop Organization

Currently most researchers working in particular application areas focus their design specifically to satisfy communication goals for their audience or to satisfy the requirements for their particular discourse. This workshop aims at initiating a discussion amongst researchers and practitioners interested in attentional processes in order to establish the base for a theoretical framework that could inform system design.
In particular the following questions will be addressed in small groups and with respect to several scenarios:

  • What are the possible levels of description for attentional foci (e.g. the word one is reading, the tool one is selecting, the task one is performing)?
  • Focus may be modified and expanded, how is this different from changing focus? (how is this achieved? How is its cost evaluated?)
  • How descriptions of attentional foci at different levels impact on the system design?
  • What are the parameters intervening in the evaluation of the effectiveness of a given focus with respect to a given goal?
  • Is it possible to create and use a taxonomy of user interruptions based, for instance, on their types (e.g. visual, textual, verbal), their time dimension (when, for how long, how often, the interruption take place)?
  • Is interruption the only way of changing focus? And in which ways can focus be expanded or modified?
  • What are the parameters intervening in the evaluation of the cost of shifting attentional focus and how are this related to the dimensions in the taxonomy?

The results of this discussion will be used to address some of the challenges involved in designing systems capable of reasoning about attention. Including the design of systems that can:

  • identify, with reasonable accuracy:
    • the user's current attentional focus (based on context, or others, e.g. gaze information [10]);
    • user's goals (these can either be declared by the user, implicitly defined by the system or the situation in which it is used, or dynamically evaluated on the basis of the user activity and focus);
    • currently available alternative foci;
    • currently unavailable foci that could be made available by the system.
  • Given the user's goals evaluate, with reasonable accuracy, the relative effectiveness of the current user's focus with respect to alternative foci;
  • Evaluate the cost of interrupting the user activity (see, for example [4, 5]).
  • Fade / disappear (e.g. doing nothing, eliminate items that could possibly cause a shift of user focus) ;
  • Gain and maintain user attention in order to direct it toward more effective foci.