Level of trust without the right of correspondence

Scientists invent ways of dealing with informational garbage in the workplace.

According to research, the concentration of attention of an average office employee is not higher than that of a sparrow. On average, office plankton, once every three minutes, is steadily distracted by some other activities. This may be a telephone conversation, checking the mailbox, a conversation on ICQ, YouTube or the next “I Krevedko” in a personal diary. Constant breaks in the workflow have become the Achilles' heel of the US information economy. According to Basex, this mess consumes about 28% of the average American’s daily time, including a lunch break, and causes a loss of $ 650 billion a year.

However, soon, we are likely to witness how the very same communications technology, which now allows us to lose concentration so easily, will restart us to our current tasks. Scientists are developing special tools that will allow prioritizing the flow of information in order to protect the monitor and keyboard workers from unwanted info-particles that flow on them with an endless waterfall. One of the programs allows the sender to "whisper" an urgent message through a pop-up window.
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Such innovations are related to this area of ​​information technology, which is called the “attention interface”. According to the professor of this discipline at Carnegie Mellon University, Scott I. Hudsan, their goal is to learn to extract maximum benefit from all the data that comes to us, “not allowing them to destroy the concentration of our attention”.

In all likelihood, our generation is the first of those facing the problem of distraction of attention. The author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Gary Merkas, believes that people are inherently prone to abrupt changes in concentration, based on sudden changes in circumstances. “We are not created to do a single task for a long time,” he says. However, in the past, people have not dealt with such a host of calls, beeps, squeaks and flashing lights. A computer science professor at the University of California, Gloria Merk, spent thousands of hours observing the behavior of office workers. Her research documented that most employees are distracted every few minutes, after which they need up to half an hour to get back on track again. “Hair and brains stand on end when you see these numbers,” says Merk.

Levels of "trust"

Microsoft Research Manager Eric Horwitz spent more than ten years developing systems that, with the help of artificial intelligence, would monitor people during their work. These programs, which are in the memory of the computer and other handheld devices, monitor and listen to the user, view his electronic organizer and mark the most important contacts. To predict the price and the possible benefit of the interrupted job, they use a mathematical model of Bayesian probability.

Speaking as a guinea pig, Horwitz decided to install the last prototype of his program. Recently, he received an urgent email message from an intern who works as an intern in their company. The mail ranking program, called Priorities, rated this message at 100 points - an excellent indicator, on a scale from 1 to 100. That same evening, the announcement of the distribution of “free food” on the first floor received a disparaging rating of 6.
Technology confidence levels are not yet ready to launch on the market. But the Priorities program inspired Microsoft to create an Outlook Mobile Manager product that will allow the Outlook email client to recognize urgent messages and “predict utility”. This means that OMM 2.0 users will be able to give the program the right to decide whether to allow e-mail to their computers, phones, and other devices. Future versions of Windows are likely to include another option made in Horwitz’s lab. This program, called Bounded Deferral, keeps the messages in a special reserve until the recipient is ready to “break in the work of thought”. The ideal, according to Horwitz, is "such a program that would be able to realize the importance of protecting the fragile human attention."

Unlike the attention management strategy that Horwitz offers, IBM is developing its own special way. One of the prototypes, which is currently being tested, is an instant messaging answering program, known as IMSavvy, which allows messages to be more tactful in the mind of a person. The program that a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Scott Hudsan, who was invited to collaborate at IBM, invented, may, judging by the activity of typing on the keyboard or the nature of using the mouse, determine when a person left the computer, or vice versa is too busy. It will protect you from wanting to destroy your concentration, telling them that you are not available right now. Future versions are likely to measure the “timeliness” of messages, also with the help of audio sensors. “Something like when your mamma asks you not to interrupt when someone is talking,” explains Hudson.

But, what about urgent and important messages? Imagine a situation where the phone is silent, the “Inbox” folder is firmly locked, and the user has gone to work with his head. Any electronic assistant will guess that at such a moment it is undesirable to distract a person, however, the risk of error remains very high. “If you cannot recognize exceptions, users will stop using your program,” says one of IBM's leading employees, Jennifer Lay.

But she found a solution. If you send a message to your employee, while he is on the phone, IMSavvy may reject your message, but will display it in a pop-up window if you use the “whisper” function. “Instead of trying to predict whether the message is worth being distracted, we decided to provide the people with a simple tool to make the right choice on their own,” Lei explained.

Translation from English:
Roman Ravve

Crossposted from worldwebstudio