Hello all, I am working on a PhD in Civil Engineering here at the University of Colorado, and my topic is diagnosis and prediction in engineering systems using distributed belief networks. I believe it would give my defense a little more oomph if I were able to demonstrate a working distributed belief network. So I wonder if anyone out there would like to help me out a little by running on their site the software which I have cooked up. I've successfully connected belief net- works on several machines here at CU, but I believe it would be more convincing to connect b.n.'s at different locations. In order to get the software running, one need only download and execute a small stub program, which then pulls the rest of the code across the Internet. As the system is implemented in Java, this does require install- ation of the Java interpreter, although that is not difficult. I would create small belief networks on your site and link together b.n.'s at different sites to create a single, larger b.n. This doesn't require file i/o access on your site, but it does require the creation of socket connections. I believe the security risk is about the same as for running a web server on your site. The belief networks I have in mind are very simple diagnostic and predictive models. The computational burden would be very small, and network traffic sporadic. You might wish to write to Michelle Franz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), who has been kind enough to install and run the distributed belief network software on her site. She could tell you whether it has been burdensome in any way. She can also vouch for my integrity. You can find out more about my project at this web site: http://sonero.colorado.edu/~robert Please contact me if you are interested. I would be happy to return the favor, of course. Have an excellent day, Robert Dodier
