Introduction > GeNIe Modeler

GeNIe Modeler is a development environment for building graphical decision-theoretic models. It was created and developed at the Decision Systems Laboratory, University of Pittsburgh between 1995 and 2015. Its name and its uncommon capitalization originates from the name Graphical Network Interface, given to the original simple user interface to SMILE, our library of classes for graphical probabilistic and decision-theoretic models.

GeNIe and SMILE have been originally developed to be major teaching and research tools in academic environments and have been used at thousands of universities world-wide. Most research conducted at the Decision Systems Laboratory, University of Pittsburgh, found its way into both programs. Because of their versatility and reliability, GeNIe and SMILE have become very popular and became de-facto standards in academia, while being embraced by a number of government, military, and commercial users. In 2015, we created a company, BayesFusion, LLC, and acquired a license for GeNIe from the University of Pittsburgh. Since that time, all further development of GeNIe, as well as its extended family of products for decision-theoretic modeling, happens at BayesFusion, LLC. Continuing the tradition of the Decision Systems Laboratory, we are making it available free of charge to the academic community for research and teaching use in order to promote decision-theoretic methods in decision support systems. GeNIe has been tested extensively in many teaching, research, and commercial environments. We are continuously improving it and are interested in user comments. We encourage the users of GeNIe to let us know about encountered problems and possible suggestions.

GeNIe has been written for the Windows operating systems. While we cannot guarantee 100% compatibility, we are verifying with each build that it runs on macOS (formerly OS X) and Linux under Wine. Please see GeNIe on a Mac or GeNIe on Linux sections for more information. GeNIe allows for building models of any size and complexity, limited only by the capacity of the operating memory of your computer.

GeNIe is a modeling environment. Models developed using GeNIe can be embedded into any applications and run on any computing platform, through GeNIe's Application Programmer's Interface (API) SMILE, which is fully portable. Our customers have used SMILE on a variety of platforms, including cloud/serverless, embedded avionics, and computing clusters.

While GeNIe offers unprecedented functionality, its strongest element, one that distinguishes it from a large number of other graphical modeling tools, is its user interface. We have paid a lot of attention to it and it shows. While developing decision-theoretic models takes typically an enormous amount of time, GeNIe cuts the effort by at least an order of magnitude and it will lead to a fast return of the investment in its licensing fees. SMILE, GeNIe's API, is not far behind and belongs to the easiest to learn and use, most reliable, and fastest libraries for graphical models.