Stephen's Research Interests

Current interests

• Applying compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct low-rank matrices
Relevant links:
• My files on the ACM server (these are for me only! requires a password. For anyone wanting to try to hack in: don't bother, the files really aren't that interesting).
• Emmanuel Candès' list of publications
• Rice University maintains the de facto standard of compressed sensing and compressive sampling resources.
• Terence Tao's blog posts about CS
• Other misc. links: Optimization Online is a repository of e-prints; the UCLA applied math reports and RICE applied math reports repositories.
• Handbook of Semidefinite Programming, with typos and the online bibliography.
For an general overview of compressed sensing, the March 2008 issue of IEEE Signal Processing magazine is devoted to compressed sensing and provides an excellent introduction.

Summer 2007 with abInventio

• A founding researcher in the Taste Predictor group, developing algorithms similar to those involved in the netflix prize.
• Relevant files (requires password)

Previous topics of interest

• Supercooled water
  
  Liquid water can be supercooled to below the equilibrium freezing temperature. In this regime, many of water's unusual properties are amplified, and it also has some features, such as a liquid-liquid phase transition, that do not appear at higher temperatures. My undergraduate work on this was supervised by my thesis advisor Francis Starr of the Department of Physics at Wesleyan University. My thesis was focused on the interplay of translational and rotational dynamics in supercooled water. Research was conducted by Molecular Dynamics simulation of ST2 water on computer clusters at both Wesleyan University in Connecticut and St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Collaboration was also done with Peter Poole of St. Francis Xavier University.
  
  Papers published on this topic:
  • May 2007: "Relation between the Widom line and the breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein relation in supercooled water", Kumar, Buldyrev, Becker, Poole, Starr and Stanley; in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104
  • August 2006: "Fractional Stokes-Einstein and Debye-Stokes-Einstein Relations in a Network-Forming Liquid", Becker, Poole, Starr; in Physical Review Letters, vol. 97
  
  
  
• Falling Dominos
  
  Many people have played with domino chains, and perhaps many people have wondered how you can adjust the spacing between adjacent dominoes in order to maximize or minimize the speed that the domino chain moves at. In this fun project, I gave a little bit of help to Bill Briggs of the University of Colorado at Denver in the summer of 2002 to investigate such questions. A published article is in the UMAP journal (not available online, sorry).
  
  Papers published on this topic:
  • "The Dynamics of Falling Dominoes", Wagon, Pontarelli, Becker, Briggs; in UMAP, vol. 26.