People

Ashley, Kevin D.

Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Professor of Intelligent Systems, Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems
PhD, University of Massachusetts

Contact:
3939 O'Hara Street, Room 519
412-624-7496
412-624-9149
ashley@pitt.edu
http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/ashley/Kevin Ashley's Home Page.html

Summary:
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.

Research Interests: My research interests in Learning, Law and Computer Science are to: (1) develop computational models of case?based reasoning (CBR) in domains like law and practical ethics as an intellectual methodology for better understanding comparative evaluation with cases and principles and as a basis for intelligent computer systems to educate students and assist practitioners; (2) develop case?based and analogical reasoning as alternative techniques for representing and acquiring knowledge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs; (3) identify and analyze special legal problems posed by computer technology in such areas as intellectual property, commercial law, product liability, technology licensing, computer crime and privacy.

Projects/Labs

Publications

Proceedings of the Workshop on AIED Applications for Ill-Defined Domains at the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. Aleven, V., Ashley, K., Lynch, C., & Pinkwart, N. (Eds.) (2007). Los Angeles (CA), published online at http://aied.inf.ed.ac.uk/AIED2007/Ill-Defined_Workshop.pdf
Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains at the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Aleven, V., Ashley, K., Lynch, C., & Pinkwart, N. (Eds.) (2006). Jhongli (Taiwan), National Central University.
Aleven, V., Ashley, K., Lynch, C., Pinkwart, N. Defining domains: A literature survey. Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-defined Domains at the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). 2006. Pages 1-10.

There are 3 publications total. View All