Directing Attention in Online Aggregate Sensor Streams via Auditory Blind Value Assignment

Multiparty collaborative applications in which groups of people act in concert to achieve some real-world goal abound. In these situations, it is useful for a central planning agent to receive online audio-visual information from all participants. However, as the size of the group grows, it becomes difficult to process all the sensory streams; cognitive overload prevents direct analysis of sensory streams for situational awareness. To avoid this situation, an automatic method is needed to assign value to each stream and direct the attention of the planning agent to those streams which are most valuable. We present an audio-based blind value assignment (BVA) method to address this problem, and experiments demonstrating the method's efficacy. We demonstrate that use of audio BVA techniques results in automatic value judgments which are broadly similar to human value judgments and superior to automatic judgments based on video information