University of Pittsburgh
Kevin Ashley holds interdisciplinary appointments as a Professor of Law and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science. 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 PhD in computer science in 1988 from the University of Massachusetts, where he held an IBM Graduate Research Fellowship, and which recently honoured him with its Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy Award in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Education.
His research interests include applying machine learning and natural language processing to mine argument-related information from legal texts, linking computational models of case-based reasoning (CBR), argumentation, and decision-making as a basis for intelligent systems to educate students, assisting practitioners and acquiring knowledge in AI programs.
Recently, he co-founded the Center for Text Analytic Methods in Legal Studies at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He also focuses on identifying and analyzing special legal problems posed by computer technology in such areas as intellectual property, commercial law, product liability, technology licensing, and privacy. In June 2017, Cambridge University Press published his book Artificial Intelligence and Legal Analytics: New Tools for Law Practice in the Digital Age.
For his PhD, he developed Hypo, an AI CBR system that reasoned by analogy to past legal cases, made arguments about legal fact situations and posed hypothetical cases. Professor Edwina Rissland was his dissertation advisor. 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 IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. 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. More recently, he has been a Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney Faculty Scholar, 2011-2012, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bologna, from October through November 2011, and a frequent Visiting Professor at the University of Bologna School of Law.
He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence and Law, the journal of record for the field of AI & Law, and his students and he regularly publishes research in the biennial International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) and the annual conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Jurix).
