My original source finally got back to me. The topic I want is called transfer learning. I'll share any survey resources I find here.
EDIT: As I promised, if I find a literature survey I'll include it here. I found this one.
Reference
PAN, S. J.; YANG, Q. A Survey on Transfer Learning. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, v. 22, n. 10, p. 1345–1359, out. 2010.