James Saunderson

I am a graduate student in the EECS department at MIT. My advisors are Prof. Pablo Parrilo and Prof. Alan Willsky. I am a member of the Stochastic Systems Group which is a part of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.

In 2008 I received the Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and the Bachelor of Engineering degree in electrical engineering from the University of Melbourne. I spent the first half of 2009 as a volunteer teacher at Divundu Combined School in beautiful Divundu, Namibia.

Contact

• Email:

• Address: 77 Massachusetts Ave, 32D-572, Cambridge MA 02139, USA

Publications and Preprints

2012

• Polynomial-sized semidefinite representations of derivative relaxations of spectrahedral cones
  J. Saunderson, P. A. Parrilo
  preprint, August 2012
  [arxiv] [pdf]

• Diagonal and low-rank matrix decompositions, correlation matrices, and ellipsoid fitting
  J. Saunderson, V. Chandrasekaran, P. A. Parrilo, A. S. Willsky
  SIAM J. Matrix Analysis and Applications, December 2012
  [arxiv] [doi] [pdf] [bibtex]

2011

• Tree-structured statistical modeling via convex optimization
  J. Saunderson, V. Chandrasekaran, P. A. Parrilo, A. S. Willsky
  Proc. 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2011
  [doi] [pdf] [bibtex]

2008

• A local-search 2-approximation for 2-correlation-clustering
  T. Coleman, J. Saunderson, A. Wirth
  Proc. European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), September 2008
  [doi] [pdf] [bibtex]

• Spectral clustering with inconsistent advice
  T. Coleman, J. Saunderson, A. Wirth
  Proc. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), June 2008
  [doi] [pdf] [bibtex]

Theses

• Master's Thesis: Subspace identification via convex optimization, May 2011
  [dspace] [pdf]

• Honour's Thesis: Mostow's rigidity theorem, November 2008
  [pdf]

Teaching

MIT

• Fall 2011: TA for 6.255/15.093J Optimization Methods

Divundu combined school

• January 2009 – June 2009: Teacher of grades 8–10 mathematics and physical science

University of Melbourne

• Semester 2, 2008: Lab demonstrator for 431-461 Signal Processing 2

• Semester 1, 2008: Lab demonstrator for 431-335 Signal Processing 1

• Semester 2, 2007: Tutor for 431-221 Fundamentals of Signals and Systems

• Semester 1, 2007: Lab demonstrator for 431-325 Stochastic Signals and Systems

• Semester 2, 2006: Tutor for 431-221 Fundamentals of Signals and Systems