BNet.News
In This Issue: January/February 2006 
•   Charles River Analytics and SIMAF Present SAMPLE Agents Using BNet on the EAAGLES Flight Simulator at I/ITSEC
•   BNet.Builder User Tip: Grid and Declutter
•   BNet.EngineKit User Tip: Belief Alerts
•   Upcoming UAI 2006 Conference
•   Publicize Your Belief Network Success Story
Charles River Analytics and SIMAF Present SAMPLE Agents Using BNet on the EAAGLES Flight Simulator at I/ITSEC
ORLANDO, FL - Charles River Analytics and the Simulation and Analysis Facility (SIMAF) of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base jointly presented the SAMPLE intelligent agent architecture and the EAAGLES flight simulator at I/ITSEC, the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference. I/ITSEC takes place in Orlando, FL, from November 28 to December 1, 2005, with attendees from the armed forces, industry, academia, and government agencies.

EAAGLES (Extensible Architecture for Analysis and Generation of LinkEd Simulations) is SIMAF's virtual simulation package that has been seamlessly interfaced with Charles River Analytics' SAMPLE and GRADE toolkits. Both SAMPLE and GRADE employ bayesian networks with BNet.Builder and BNet.EngineKit as Cory Wallenstein, Charles River Analytics’ Technical Lead for the effort, explains: "I specifically employ BNet for assessing the threat of other aircraft, assessing the formations of groups of aircraft, and assessing the relative advantage a pilot may have in an engagement over an adversary."

In describing the presentation at I/ITSEC, Wallenstein said, “At the conference, visitors were able to step inside the cockpit of an F16 to interact with the EAAGLES flight simulation system and test their skill against our SAMPLE fighter pilot agents.”

For more information about Charles River Analytics' presentation at I/ITSEC, click here:

Upcoming UAI 2006 Conference
The 22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2006) will take place from July 13th - July 16th, 2006, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Scientists from Charles River Analytics will be available to answer questions about BNet.Builder and BNet.EngineKit.

For more information on the conference, click here.

BNet.Builder User Tip: Grid and Declutter
The magnetic grid can be used to help you position nodes in your Bayesian networks. When enabled, you'll see a faint grid of dots in the background and the upper-left corner of each node will snap to a dot when being repositioning. To enable the magnetic grid, either
select the Magnetic Grid toolbar toggle button (a grid of dots with an arrow) or select the View/Magnetic grid menu item.

Another tool to assist you in positioning the nodes in your Bayesian networks is the Declutter Layout. You may often end up with nodes that overlap each other, especially when you expand beliefs or evidence on a node. The Declutter Layout slightly repositions overlapping nodes so they no longer overlap.

To switch to the Declutter Layout, click the Declutter toolbar button.

BNet.EngineKit User Tip: Belief Alerts
You can register a BeliefListener with either a DiscreteNode or an entire Bayesian Network to receive events when beliefs change. If you only want to receive belief events that meet specified conditions, you can use a BeliefAlert. For example, to only receive events when the belief for a certain node's "true" state is above 0.9, you can use the ThresholdBeliefCondition class:

DiscreteNode node = ...
BeliefCondition condition = new
ThresholdBeliefCondition(node, "true",
ThresholdBeliefCondition.GREATER_THAN, 0.9); BeliefListener listener = ...;
BeliefAlert alert = new BeliefAlert(condition, listener);


When you want to stop receiving these events, call the BeliefAlert object's stop() method. Also note that you can create your own custom implementation of BeliefCondition.

Publicize Your Belief Network Success Story
Want to show off your applications of belief networks to others using them in their research? Send us your success stories. We would like to include at least one in each edition of BNet.News.

To send us your story, please contact lcordeiro@cra.com or zcox@cra.com.

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