Professor of Computer Science
(812) 855-9756
leake@indiana.edu

See also:
my personal home page

Technical reports and paper reprints available from
ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/leake

Ph.D., Yale University, 1990

• Visiting Research Associate, Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Spring-Summer 1990
• Member: Cognitive Science Society, American Association for Artificial Intelligence

My research investigates the role of experience and goals in focusing learning in complex domains. The ability to perform successfully in such domains depends on being able to recognize the need to learn and to select appropriate strategies for obtaining needed information.

I am studying this goal-driven learning process in the context of computer programs whose search for information is guided by reasoning about current information needs and by their prior experience--both successes and failures--dealing with similar situations. The process that these programs use to apply their experience is case-based reasoning. Case-based reasoning systems maintain a memory of prior episodes and solve new problems by retrieving and adapting the solutions from those episodes. This process allows reuse of prior solutions while maintaining the flexibility to respond to changes in circumstances. I am investigating how goals direct the case-based reasoning process for both external and introspective learning.

Leake, D. B. (1994). Towards a computer model of memory search strategy learning.
Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 549-554.

Leake, D.B. (In press). Learning, goals, and learning goals: A perspective on goal-driven learning.
Artificial Intelligence Review, 9(1), 1995.

Leake, D.B. (In press). Abduction, experience, and goals: A model of everyday abductive explanation.
Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.

Ram, A. & Leake, D.B. (Eds.) (In press).
Goal-Driven Learning. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Leake, D.B. (In press). Combining rules and cases to learn case adaptation.
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Pittsburgh, PA, 1995.