Introduction > Acknowledgments

Support for the development GeNIe, QGeNIe and SMILE at the University of Pittsburgh was provided in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grants F49620-97-1-0225 and F49620-00-1-0122, by the National Science Foundation under Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, grant IRI-9624629, by Hughes Raytheon Laboratories, Malibu, California, by ARPA's Computer Aided Education and Training Initiative under grant N66001-95-C-8367, and by the University of Pittsburgh Central Development Fund.

While little of the original code has remained and most of the programs have been rewritten with time, the principal developers of GeNIe, QGeNIe and SMILE (listed alphabetically) included:

Saeed Amizadeh, Steve Birnie, Jeroen J.J. Bogers, Girish Chavan, Hanyang Chen, Jian Cheng, Denver H. Dash, Martijn de Jongh, Marek J. Druzdzel, Daniel Garcia Sanchez, Nancy Jackson, Randy Jagt, Joost Koiter, Marcin Kozniewski, Hans van Leijen, Yan Lin, Tsai-Ching Lu, Paul Maaskant, Agnieszka Onisko, Hans Ove Ringstad, Tomek Sowinski, Carl P.R. Thijssen, Miguel Tjon Kon Fat, Daniel Tomalesky, Mark Voortman, Changhe Yuan, Haiqin Wang and Adam Zagorecki.

We would like to acknowledge contributions of the following individuals (listed alphabetically) to coding, documentation, graphics, web site, and testing of SMILE and GeNIe: Kimberly Batch, Avneet S. Chatha, Cristina Conati, Roger Flynn, Abigail Gertner, Charles E. Grindle, Christopher Hall, Christopher A. Geary, William Hogan, Susan E. Holden, Margaret (Peggie) Hopkins, Jun Hu, Kent Ma, Robert (Chas) Murray, Zhendong Niu, Shih-Chueh (Sejo) Pan, Bharti Rai, Michael S. Rissman, Luiz E. Sant'Anna, Jeromy A. Smith, Jiwu Tao, Kurt VanLehn, Martin van Velsen, Anders Weinstein, David Weitz, Zaijiang Yuan, Jie Xu and many others.

Students in the courses Decision Analysis and Decision Support Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, Decision Support Systems for Public Managers at Carnegie Mellon University, Decision Support and Expert Systems at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and Advanced Databases and Data Warehouses at the Bialystok University of Technology, Poland, provided us with useful feedback and suggestions.

GeNIe, QGeNIe and SMILE embed a number of good ideas that we have gratefully assimilated over time from other software, whether decision-theoretic or not. The great user interface of Analytica was an inspiration and a role model for us. Analytica's user interface was developed by Max Henrion and Brian Arnold at Carnegie Mellon University in late 1980s and early 1990s. Our treatment of submodels is essentially the same as in Analytica. GeNIe Metalog Builder interface is strongly inspired by the interface provided by Tom Keelin at Metalog Distribution web site at http://metalogdistributions.com/. Knowledge Industries' (KI) WinDX software was a source of inspiration for our diagnostic functionality and interface. The ideas contained in WinDX, on information gathering modes, such as discriminating among groups of hypotheses and pursuing specific hypothesis, were developed over a span of time from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s by David Heckerman, Eric Horvitz, Mark Peot and Michael Shwe. The use of alternative abstractions of the differential diagnosis in value of information computations was pioneered in the Pathfinder project that was commercialized as Intellipath and then, refined later in the KI Bayesian network inference tool kit. Beyond functionality, the configuration of panes and bar charts for abnormalities, observations, and valuable tests in the KI software were an inspiration for the interface of GeNIe and SMILE.

We would like to thank the U.S. News and World Report for considerable data collection effort and generosity in making the collected retention related data available. These data (file retention.txt) have been used in describing the learning component of GeNIe.

Map files used as examples for explaining GeNIe geo-processing capability originate from National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/). We relied on the ETOPO1 Global Relief Model Maps (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/) and extracted them through their interactive Grid Extract interface https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/grid-extract/.