A Curse of Riches or a Blessing? Information Access and Awareness Under Scarce Cognitive Resources

Abstract

The informational landscape of the world has been changing quickly. The fast-paced drop in the cost of storage and bandwidth over the last decade, coupled with the rapid expansion in the number of content sources, has made unprecedented quantities of information available to people. Beyond external sources of content, typical personal stores now rival the size of the entire Web just a short time ago. But we face a challenging bottleneck: In stark contrast to the explosive growth in public and private content, stands our limited time-and unchanging abilities. For increasing numbers of people in the world, the primary informational bottleneck is our scarce attentional and memory resources. I will present research on addressing such informational bottlenecks with tools for searching, browsing, remembering, and staying aware. I will review challenges and opportunities of employing automated learning and reasoning methods, including efforts to construct and leverage models of attention and memory. Finally, I will touch on the promise of developing new designs for interaction and display informed by psychological findings on visual attention and spatial memory.