Small But Scary

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...

Uniform Boilerplate and List Processing Or: Scrap Your Scary Types

Generic traversals over recursive data structures are often referred to as boilerplate code. The definitions of functions involving such traversals may repeat very similar patterns, but with variations for different data types and different functionality. Libraries of operations abstracting away boilerplate code typically rely on elaborate types to make operations generic. The motivating observ...