March 17, 2018

Briefly

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Steve Curtis

    Interesting use of the words ‘trained his computer to catch scofflaws’
    When the story indicates he used over 2000 images of cars, trucks, buses etc and ‘programmed’ his computer to match those of vehicles which werent supposed to be in the designated lane. Surely the NY Times has writers who dont think computers are capable of independent thought and are also ‘trainable’

    7 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      Eh. It’s standard terminology in the field, and doesn’t seem like an unreasonable metaphor. The OED has it attested back to 1958 — and has ‘training’ applied to plants since the 17th century and animals since the 16th.

      7 years ago