Stephen Becker's Homepage

a small picture of Stephen

I am a graduate student in the Applied & Computational Math department at Caltech, working under Professor Emmanuel Candès. My interests are in convex optimization algorithms, in particular those arising from basis pursuit and nuclear norm minimization.

What's new, and quick links

  • Winter quarter, 2010: I am the TA for ACM 114, Parallel Algorithms for Scientific Applications .
  • Oct 23 2009: Quick intro to convex optimization talk for ACM^tea. This was split over two weeks, 50 minutes each. The final slides mention some online resources and free online textbooks. Another online textbook which isn't mentioned (and free for Caltech library patrons) is Numerical Optimization by Bonnans, Gilbert, Lemarechal and Sagastizabal.
  • June 2009: I just started using Mendeley to organize my PDFs. So far, it's exactly what I had been looking for and I highly recommend it. Several other students in my department started using it as well. On a similar note, many people have recommended Dropbox for file storage and syncing, and some collaborators are using it for editing a paper.
  • Quantum state tomography via compressed sensing by Gross, Liu, Flammia, Becker and Eisert, is on the Arxiv, Sept 20 2009
  • NESTA: a fast and accurate first-order method for sparse recovery by S. Becker, J. Bobin and E.J. Candès is submitted for publication, April 21 2009
  • svt.caltech.edu is a software package for Singular Value Thresholding, for Matrix Completion problems. Please email me if you have questions about the software (and include information on the verson of Matlab, the operating system, and the hardware -- e.g. 32-bit or 64-bit). We are working on making it more compatible with 64-bit systems and compatible with complex-valued data.
  • Research interests and info on the SHC Cluster at CACR; here's an introductory SHC guide I wrote in August '08. In September '09, the cluster finished its migration to RHEL; learn more here.

    • Contact info

    My office is room 333 in Annenberg (building #16) on the Caltech campus, and the mail code is 305-16. The office phone is x3551 (i.e. 626 395-3551), and our research group room (room 308) has a phone with extension x3515. I moved from my Firestone building office in July 2009, so the old mail code of 217-50 is no longer correct. Here are several maps of the Caltech campus for visitors.

    My email at caltech:
      (srbecker  @  acm.caltech.edu)
    Old email addresses:
      (srbecker  @  caltech.edu) and
      (srbecker  @  wesleyan.edu)
      will also be forwarded to me. Both are still valid (the wesleyan.edu email is valid forever).
    Other:
      (stephen.beckr  @  gmail.com) for non-work communications

    Page last modified Jan 04, 2010