User:Christopher G. Baker

My name is Christopher G. Baker. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Florida State University. I am currently participating in an internship at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM, while I complete my dissertation.

My work at Sandia is on high-performance, robust parallel algorithms in the http://software.sandia.gov/trilinos. Trilinos is a collection of large-scale solvers: linear systems, eigenvalue problems, non-linear optimization. My principal work is on Anasazi, the block eigensolvers package.

My master's thesis was entitled "A Block Incremental Algorithm For Computing Dominant Singular Subspaces." In this work, I described and analyzed a family of methods for incrementally computing low-rank approximations of a matrix, based on the truncated SVD. This should be contrasted with the common technique of computing the full SVD of a matrix (either incrementally or as a batch) and truncating the unwanted part of the factorization.

My dissertation concerns optimization on Riemannian manifolds. More specifically, I am interested in the class of retraction-based optimization methods, particularly the Riemannian trust-region methods. Feel free to visit http://www.scs.fsu.edu/~cbaker for more information on this topic, as well as links to publications.