Arrogant man applies for job, uses machine learning, gets kicked out of office
(This will make more sense in a minute) Back in 2005 I was looking for a job and I saw one at a startup in Austin that was working on a tech to improve images from cell phones. Well that should be an easy one. I happen to know a thing or two about THAT, I said, patting myself on the back super duper hard. They were looking for an "image specialist" to work under some big shot guy who had written some papers on it. I do not remember the details, also I don't care. But this was a fascination of mine already, and I'd built this little engine called iStill that would pull images from a webcam and improve them based on how other images from that same web cam had been improved. I had the machine try to improve images, and then I'd pick the ones that were the best, and it would store that info for later. That's a high level view of how it worked. Today we'd call that human-guided machine learning but at the time I called it whatever the hell I'd cobbled ...