Gary Bradski is starting to lead a project to use graphical models for analysing manufacturing data.
In the longer term, Gary anticipates this project needing a more general purpose graphical models library. To this end, he is putting together some contract programers to essentially convert BNT from Matlab to C/C++ (supervised by Kevin Murphy). The idea is to "hollow out" BNT, replacing compute-intenstive Matlab functions with C implementations, piece by piece. The resulting C code will then be (re)written to take advantage of parallel computers and clusters of computers. The C code can be called by Matlab or other languages (e.g., R, Java, etc.). Eventually, all the code will be in C, thereby eliminating the dependence on Matlab.
The thought right now is to make the basic source-code available to the community to enable people to easily develop extensions (and fix bugs!).
The long term goal is to stimulate commercial exploitation of graphical models, and hence generate demand for more CPU cycles. Also, feedback from developers of large scale applications may be used to influence design decisions of future Intel processors. In this respect, the project is similar to OpenCV, Intel's open source library for computer vision.