Brief Biography

            Dr. Kevin Ashley holds interdisciplinary appointments as a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, a Professor of Law, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science. His goals are to contribute to Artificial Intelligence (AI) research on case-based and analogical reasoning, argumentation and explanation and to develop instructional and information retrieval systems for professionals in case-based domains such as law and ethics. Currently, he and his students are pursuing research projects in automatically indexing legal case texts, engaging law students in on-line argumentation dialogues, intelligent retrieval of ethics codes and cases, and web-based tutoring to help students get more from reading ethics cases.  He received a B.A. in philosophy (magna cum laude) from Princeton University in 1973, J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School in 1976, and Ph.D. in computer science in 1988 from the University of Massachusetts where he held an IBM Graduate Research Fellowship. For his Ph.D. he developed an AI CBR system, HYPO, which reasons by analogy to past legal cases, makes   arguments about legal fact situations and poses hypothetical cases.  MIT Press / Bradford Books published his book based on his dissertation entitled Modeling Legal Argument: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals.  In April, 1990, the National Science Foundation selected Professor Ashley as a Presidential Young Investigator, and in 2002 he was selected as a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. From June, 1988 through July, 1989, he was a Visiting Scientist at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.  For four years prior to his computer science graduate work, he was an associate attorney at White & Case, a large Wall Street law firm. While a philosophy major at Princeton, he was a research assistant for Professor Walter Kaufmann.
 

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