Lorien Pratt is an American computer scientist known for inventing two disciplines: machine learning transfer [1] and decision intelligence.
[3] Since 1988, she has conducted research on the use of machine learning as an academic, professor, industry analyst, and practicing data scientist.
This approach, still largely theoretical when the book was published in 1998, is also called metalearning and is now a foundational underpinning of machine learning algorithms such as GPT-3 and DALL-E. Pratt's research includes early work in transfer learning where she developed the discriminability-based transfer (DBT) algorithm in 1993 during her tenure as a professor of computer science at Colorado School of Mines.
This paper is considered one of the earliest academic works referring to the use of transfer in machine learning and has been cited over 400 times as foundational research for deep neural networks.
Pratt's work is cited as a core starting point for defining modern aspects of decision intelligence.