Scarce but scary

Predicting Task Completion from Rich but Scarce Data

We present a data-driven model for predicting task completion in Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor, which takes turns picking stories and listens to the child read aloud [1]. However, children do not always finish stories, and we would like to understand why, or at least detect when they are about to stop. So our EDM challenge is to learn a model to predict task completion – a widely used metric o...

Scary Shadows and Auto - Visualization

Mankind has a history of developing techniques that undermine the very things that we are designed for; physical activity, social interactivity, free creativity, etc. This project is an investigation into the processes that define how we experience and interpret interactive, entertainment stimulus, with a view to increasing both the potential for user investment and satisfaction, and the techni...

Actin Motility: Formin a SCAry Tail

A new biochemical analysis has revealed that the Rickettsia bacterial protein Sca2--recently shown to be essential for virulence and actin-dependent motility--assembles actin filaments using a mechanism that functionally resembles the processive elongation tactics used by formins.

Time will judge 'scary' dispensing regulations.

When Are Nonconvex Problems Not Scary?

In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete applications such as dictionary learning, generalized phase retrieval, and orthogonal tensor decomposition are known to induce such structures. We describe a second-o...