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 Σx^k=(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.