Introduction: GeNIe

From DSL

GeNIe is a development environment for building graphical decision-theoretic models. It has been developed at the Decision Systems Laboratory, University of Pittsburgh. We are making it available to the community to promote decision-theoretic methods in decision support systems. We have tested GeNIe extensively and are using it in our teaching and our research projects. We have also used it in commercial applications. 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's name and its uncommon capitalization originates from the name Graphical Network Interface, given to the original simple interface to SMILE, our library of functions for graphical probabilistic and decision-theoretic models. GeNIe is an outer shell to SMILE.

GeNIe is implemented in Visual C++ and draws heavily on the MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). This makes it not easily portable, although it runs under one of the most popular computing platforms: Windows operating systems. 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 developer environment. Models developed using GeNIe can be embedded into any applications and run on any computing platform, using SMILE, which is fully portable.

We have designed and developed GeNIe and SMILE to be major teaching and research tools in academic environments and we are using it in our research and in teaching courses at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Alaska, Anchorage. Most of our research results find ultimately their way into GeNIe and SMILE. Because of their versatility and reliability, GeNIe and SMILE have also been embraced by a number of government, military and commercial users.