Some popular press accounts of bayesnets etc.

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

Here is an article from LA times back in 1996 about how Bill Gates is a 
"believer" in the belief networks...

http://www.ai.mit.edu/~murphyk/Bayes/la.times.html

You also find out from this that the dreaded Microsoft paper-clip office 
assistant was originally based on
bayesnetworks (According to Eric Horvitz, the original office assistant 
would pop up much less often; but the
product folks wanted the "feature" to be prominent and so made it pop up 
more often).


Here is another (this time NYT) article on the use of Bayes net 
techniques  (also has a bit of bio on the Reverend Bayes himself).

http://www.ai.mit.edu/~murphyk/Bayes/nyt.28april01.html


Finally, there is a lot of information in the "bibliographical and 
historical notes" section of Chapter 14 (pages 528--532). By the way, I hope
you folks are reading those sections in each chapter--they are often quite 
comprehensive (and you would even know such factoids as the one that
parts of planning chapter were based on the notes that were developed at 
ASU CSE 471 ca. 1999 ;-)

Rao