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Stephen Becker is an associate professor of applied mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, with courtesy appointments in the Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering and Computer Science departments. Previously he was a Herman Goldstine Postdoctoral fellow in Mathematical Sciences at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY, and a postdoctoral fellow via the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris at Paris 6, supervised by Patrick Combettes (LJLL) and Volkan Cevher (EPFL). He received his PhD in 2011 from Caltech under Emmanuel Candès, and bachelor’s degrees in math and physics from Wesleyan University.

Our group’s work has been recognized with the Beale Orchard-Hays prize given out every 3 years by the Mathematical Optimization Society. We are graciously funded by the DOE Office of Science’s ASCR, by a DOE funded MMICC center CHaRMNET, and by the National Science Foundation (NSF); and have previously been supported by Northrop Grumman, Bloomberg and by NVIDIA hardware grants.

Stephen is on the editorial boards at Transactions on Machine Learning Research and the SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science (SIMODS); a technical editor for Mathematical Programming Computation; and a frequent meta-reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR and AISTATS.

More information about us at people.

Contact info

 
  • Email: stephen.becker@colorado.edu
  • Office telephone: +1 (303) 669 8379
  • Office: 338 ECOT (Engineering Center, office tower). For help finding your way to the office tower, see engineering center map.

Please note: this website amath.colorado.edu/faculty/becker (also mirrored via github pages) may eventually be deprecated in favor of a more homogenous faculty website, but for now this is the website that is updated most often.

My CV is on my CU Experts Profile page.

News! We’re hiring for a postdoc position (apply before June 3 2025)

See the job ad. This is for an ASCR funded project on data compression, joint with Prof. Alireza Doostan in Aerospace engineering

News! We’re part of the CHaRMNET plasma modeling center as of 2022

CU press release on the plasma project. MSU press release as well.

Math Alliance logo Spectra logo Proud member of the Math Alliance and pround ally of Spectra

News updates

As of October 2022, the website is built with Jekyll and we’ll have blog-post style news updates. Here’s a summary of old updates

A similar list of announcements is at the Announcements Page of our Google Site

  • Summer internships for 2023
  • Fall 2022, Stephen is on sabbatical at Institut Montpellierain Alexander Grothendieck (IMAG) in Montpellier France. He will return to Boulder by January 2023.
  • Call for papers: special issue on Big Scientific Data and Machine Learning in Science and Engineering, submission deadline Feb 1 2022
  • Summer internships for 2022
    • Kevin at NSA
    • Jacob at LLNL
  • Summer internships for 2021
    • Richie will intern at Argonne national labs
    • Liam will intern for IBM Research Dublin again
    • Akshay will intern at NIST
    • Kevin… TBD
    • Erik and Osman will have graduated
  • August 2020, Leo defends his PhD thesis
  • Stephen will be speaking at the AIMS South Africa Spring School on Mathematics of Data Science in September 2019 ( SIAM article describing AIMS)
  • Summer internships for 2020
    • Liam is working for IBM Research Dublin
    • Osman is working for Fujitsu
    • Erik is working for Archer Dx
  • Summer internships for 2019
    • Zhishen (Leo) Huang at Respond Software
    • Richie Clancy at Sensory, Inc
    • David Kozak at University of Genova working with Lorenzo Raso (MIT/Genova)
    • Osman Malik at IBM Research with Lior Horesh and Misha Kilmer
  • April 2019, Matt Maierhofer and Marc Thomson defend their Masters theses
  • April 2019, Jessica Gronski and Eric Kightley defend their PhD
  • November 2018, Richard Border defends his Masters thesis
  • October 2018, James defends his PhD. Congratulations James!
  • June 2018, Stephen is a CCIMI Distinguished Visitor at Cambridge, giving a CCIMI short-course
  • Summer internships for 2018
    • Jessica Gronski at Savvy Sherpa (now United Health Care)
    • Eric Kightley at Respond Software
    • Leo Huang at USC
  • May 2018, Farhad departs to take a tenure-track position in CS at U. Mass Lowell
  • January 2018, Stephen is one of four founding members of the Imaging Science IRT
  • Spring 2017, Farhad Pourkamali-Anaraki gradautes with his PhD, staying with us for another year as a postdoc
  • Spring 2017, Derek Driggs graduates with his MS, heads to Cambrdige in October
  • January 2017, group member Derek Driggs (BS/MS) awarded a Cambridge Gates Fellowship (4 year fellowship to Cambridge for a PhD).
  • Jan 2017, our group awarded a contract for signal processing algorithms with Northrop Grumman
  • May 2016, our group awarded a gift from the Bloomberg data science program
  • March 2016, Alex Gittens and Michael Mahoney visit
  • March 2016, students have summer internship offers from the following companies:
  • July 12 2015, with Michael Grant and Emmanuel Candes, we have won the Beale-Orchard-Hays prize at ISMP 2015
  • June 24 2015, selected for 2015 ICML Reviewer award
  • Summer 2015, organizing the Workshop on Robust Subspace Learning and Computer Vision RSL-CV at ICCV 2015 (Santiago, Chile).
  • Nov. ‘14, we have free software available for our robust PCA algorithm at NIPS 2014 in Montreal.
  • Sept. ‘14, two papers accepted at NIPS
  • Organizing NIPS 2014 “Out of the box: robustness in high dimension” workshop at NIPS 2014 in Montreal.
  • Oct 6, 2022

    Switched to Jekyll for website

    Migrating the website to use jekyll instead of jem-doc. Jem-doc is now about 10 years old and not supported, and finally broke with some python 2 vs python 3 issues. This new jekyll website should display much better on phones.