Our society has been experiencing drastic changes in the last decades. We have evolved from a society suffering from information scarcity in the early 1990s to a society in which human attention has become one of the rarest and at the same time most valuable resources.
“If every image made and every word written from the earliest stirring of civilization to the year 2003 were converted to digital information, the total would come to five exabytes. […] By next year, we'll be producing five exabytes every 10 minutes” [Shermer].
In our daily routines we are flooded with huge amounts of data, but ’the refinery that converts ”data” into ”information” is human attention’ [Lanham]. This unidirectional flow of information results in hundreds of stimuli competing simultaneously in a battle for attention, be them e.g. advertisements, public video screens, or push notifications from mobile devices.

The continuous flood of data requests an enormous level of mental effort for the individual which is continuously and only directed at filtering relevant from irrelevant information.

In 1971, Simon probably was the first to formulate the concept of the attention economy [Simon]. In the late 1990s, the idea was again picked up by Goldhaber [Goldhaber], Franck [Franck] and Beck and Davenport [BeckDavenport] who established the term `Attention Economy’. In contrast to Goldhaber and Franck, who took a more fundamental, philosophic approach, creating a model based on the new technological options in combination with a narcissistic conception of man, Beck and Davenport concentrated on economic aspects.
This brought forth a controversy discussion about the usage of the terminology which has not completely been solved.

The attention economy phenomenon is not only a purely academic problem but also has severe impact on people’s well-being and productivity. Investigating internal losses due to information overload and unproductivity, Intel’s own research indicated that each knowledge worker loses ca. eight hours per week due to information overload, which for a company its size would result in a cost of $1 billion and for the complete U.S. economy ca. $900 billion per year [SpiraBurke].

Besides, effects of the increasing scarcity of human attention are also noticeable in other domains like in the advertisement industry. According to Pieters, advertising effectiveness has suffered dramatically [Pieters] due to the oversupply of advertisements. The issue of reaching customers has led to the tendencies of targeting all possible human senses or customizing advertisements to personal preferences of customers. This personalization which mainly occurs in online advertising, aims at increasing the relevance of the information and thus succeeding in the battle for customer attention. However, this personalization of advertisements holds the immense issue of the collection and treatment of private and confidential data and hence are broadly rejected by a majority of online users (68%) [Brenner].

Generally, the advertisement industry represents the sector with the most obvious economic interest in the field of audience sensing and attention estimation. Employing developments from the research field of Contextual Awareness, in which numerous sensors like e.g. cameras, microphones or distance sensors have been used to provide an extensive contextual understanding of information systems, the advertisement industry has put a lot of effort of evolving from mere statistical data on audience analysis to an actual real-time automatic audience measurement technology. Not only the mere presence, activity and number of humans is of interest, but as well the overall situation, location and parameters which influence the interaction. E.g. Intel has taken a step further, estimating statistical audience information like gender and age [Intel]. Traditionally having been restricted to mere statistical traffic data, these recent efforts are directed at tailoring digital information systems to be best possible aware of the audience.

Besides the mentioned social and economic problems, the major technical problem to be solved is to answer the question of how to actually measure attention and perception? During our extensive research, we did not succeed in finding metrics, models or measurement techniques that are suitable for unobtrusive attention estimation in public spaces. Advancing the field of attention estimation, these missing prerequisites need to be developed as generic and generally applicable as possible.

Concluding we can say that, problems that derive from information overload have been perceived by the majority of the population (maybe not consciously) and punctually in the academic and industrial fields of development. Yet, regarding the impact on society and economy, this issue has not received the attention it deserves. To make essential progress in the development of attention-based systems we see it as necessary to fundamentally increase the awareness level for the issues related to information overload.

[Shermer] Michael Shermer, 'Deyfing the Doomsayers', The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 22nd, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203646004577213203698503484

[Lanham] Richard A. Lanham, 'The Economics of Attention', University of Michigan Library Spring 1997, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0036.206;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg

[SpiraNurke] J. Spira and C. Burke, Intel’s War on Information Overload, Information Overload Resource Center, http://informationoverloadresources.com/research-report/intels-war-on-information-overload-2/

[Simon] Simon, H. A. (1971), Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press

[Goldhaber] Goldhaber, M. H. (1997), 'The Attention Economy and the Net', First Monday 2 (4)

[Franck] Franck, Georg (1998), Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit. Ein Entwurf, München:Carl Hanser

[BeckDavenport] Davenport, T. H. & Beck, J. C. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2001).

[Pieters]Rik Pieters, Luk Warlop and Michel Wedel, Breaking through the clutter: Benefits of advertisement originality and familiarity for brand attention and memory, Management Science, Vol. 48, No. 6 (Jun., 2002), pp. 765-781

[Brenner] J. Brenner and L. Rainie, Search Engine Use 2012, Pew Internet, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/Main-findings/Targeted-advertising.aspx

[Intel] Intel AIM Suite, https://aimsuite.intel.com/