Dr. Thomas Colthurst
Thomas Colthurst, Ph.D. is
a
Software Engineer at Google.
He was previously Scientist at BBN Technologies from
1997 to 2007 where he
specialized in large vocabulary, conversational telephone speech (CTS).
He
holds a B.Sc. from Brown University and a Ph.D.
from MIT, both in mathematics.
His Ph.D. thesis was
Multidimensional Wavelets.
Thomas has published
extensively in
the field of large vocabulary, conversational speech recognition; he is
also the designer of the board game “Barons”, which will be released in
late 2010 by Cambridge Game Factory.
During August 2010, Thomas was a visiting fellow at the Singularity
Institute, where he worked
with Anna Salamon and Ben Hoskin on a paper about the
difficulties of learning human concepts from their statistical
correlations.
He coauthored
The 2000 BBN Byblos LVCSR System,
Advances in transcription of broadcast news and conversational
telephone
speech within the combined EARS BBN/LIMSI system,
Using untranscribed training data to improve performance,
The 2001 BYBLOS English large vocabulary conversational
speech recognition system,
A Gray path on binary partitions, and
Quadratic forms, pythagorean triples, and the equation
Σxk=(Σx)2.
In his 20% time at Google, Thomas developed a novel Bayesian method for
avoiding rapid
stereotyping (the “My TiVo thinks I’m gay” problem) when generating
personalized recommendations.
Read his
Slowly Rotating Triangle, a webcomic about pain and math
puns.
Visit his
Facebook page.