# Attention-Sensitive Alerting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.6707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.6707/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [When to Show a Suggestion? Integrating Human Feedback in AI-Assisted Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04930/) (2023)
- [Proactive Service Agents: A Unified Decision Framework, Methods, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03727/) (2026)
- [Planning for Proactive Assistance in Environments with Partial Observability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00525/) (2021)
- [Novel Techniques to Assess Predictive Systems and Reduce Their Alarm Burden](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05691/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce utility-directed procedures for mediating the flow of potentially distracting alerts and communications to computer users. We present models and inference procedures that balance the context-sensitive costs of deferring alerts with the cost of interruption. We describe the challenge of reasoning about such costs under uncertainty via an analysis of user activity and the content of notifications. After introducing principles of attention-sensitive alerting, we focus on the problem of guiding alerts about email messages. We dwell on the problem of inferring the expected criticality of email and discuss work on the Priorities system, centering on prioritizing email by criticality and modulating the communication of notifications to users about the presence and nature of incoming email.