Introduction > Acknowledgments

Support for the development QGeNIe, GeNIe 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 QGeNIe, GeNIe 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 and Decision Support and Expert Systems at the University of Alaska, Anchorage provided us with useful feedback and suggestions.

QGeNIe embeds 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 has been an inspiration and a role model for us. Analytica's user interface has been developed by Max Henrion and Brian Arnold at Carnegie Mellon University in late 1980s and early 1990s. Our treatment of submodels is very similar to that in Analytica.