Stephen Becker's Homepage

a small picture of Stephen

I am a postdoc at LJLL at Paris 6 University, having finished my PhD at Caltech in 2011. My interests are convex optimization algorithms for signal processing.

What's new

  • Jan 26 2012: just released TFOCS v.1.1, which is a major update of the old TFOCS release.
  • Dec 2011: the sparse- and low-rank solver wiki is now online! This replaces the old list of algorithms that I had. The whole world is invited to join and edit the wiki. The benefits of the wiki format are numerous: it can stay up-to-date, it allows anyone in the world to contribute (including people who write algorithms, people who use algorithms, people who are doing background research, etc.).
  • Sep 2011: I am now at Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions at Paris 6, thanks to a grant from the Fondation Sciences Mathematiques de Paris.
  • May 2011: Final version of my thesis, Practical compressed sensing : modern data acquisition and signal processing, is online.
  • May 2011: "TFOCS: Flexible First-order Methods for Rank Minimization", at the Low-rank Matrix Optimization minisymposium at the 2011 SIAM Conference on Optimization in Darmstadt. Here's the RPCA video on youtube (Matlab code to generate this is available at the RPCA demo page).
  • Sept 2010: "Templates for Convex Cone Problems with Applications to Sparse Signal Recovery" by S. Becker, E. Candès, M. Grant is available (PDF). The associated TFOCS software is available at http://tfocs.stanford.edu. Paper in Mathematical Programming Computation, 2011 vol 3 (the final publication is available at www.springerlink.com).
  • Jan 2010: I am the TA for ACM 114, Parallel Algorithms for Scientific Applications .
  • Oct 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.
  • Sept 2009: Quantum state tomography via compressed sensing by Gross, Liu, Flammia, Becker and Eisert, is on the arXiv
  • 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.
  • April 2009: NESTA: a fast and accurate first-order method for sparse recovery by S. Becker, J. Bobin and E.J. Candès is on the arXiv. More info at our NESTA website.
  • Nov 2008: svt.stanford.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 version 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.

    • Contact info

    My email is stephen.beckr@gmail.com and the office phone number (from outside of France) is +33 1 44 27 72 03.

    Page last modified Jan 26, 2012