Stephan Herhut

Science is organized knowledge.
Wisdom is organized life.

Hi :-)

I originally used this space to report on my research. Over time, and especially since joining Google in 2014, my focus has shifted towards building production systems. Currently, I indulge my passion for compilers as the technical lead for Google’s ML Compilers for CPU and GPU that power frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. My technical contributions span XLA and the MLIR compiler infrastructure.

Before working on TensorFlow, I have participated in various compiler projects at Google. Initially, I joined the Dart team and helped extend the compiler from Dart to JavaScript. I was also invoked in shrinking the Dart runtime to work on embedded systems.

Next, I helped build the new compiler toolchain for Android, with particular focus on optimizing and shrinking applications.

As part of the v8 team, I worked on making WebAssembly faster, with a focus on improved register allocation.

My interest for dynamic languages, especially those for the web, was sparked while being a Research Scientist at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. During my stay, I was part of the team behind River Trail, an effort to bring the power of data-parallel programming to the web.

Even earlier, I enjoyed the position of a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. More precisely, I was part of the Compiler Technology and Computer Architecture group where I researched compiling array programming languages to fast executable code.

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OOPSLA 2013 Publication and Talk

I will be travelling to Indianapolis in October to present our paper River Trail: A path to parallelism in JavaScript at this year’s ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications (OOPSLA) 2013. The paper discusses the design and implementation of our prototype compiler (see the preprint of the paper for details).

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ACM Web3D Conference Best Paper Award

My joint paper with Felix Klein, Dmitri Rubinstein, Kristian Sons, Farshad Einabadi, and Philipp Slusallek titled Declarative AR and image processing on the web with Xflow has won the best paper award in the category full paper at the 18th International Conference on 3D Web Technology. I even got my share of the lovely food basket that came with the prize during my recent visit at the University of Saarland.

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IFL 2013 in Nijmegen, The Netherlands

I have been invited to serve on the program committee of the 25th edition of the International Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend in person this year due to conflicting travel. This is particular heart breaking as IFL celebrates a quarter of a century of heated but friendly discussions on implementing functional languages.

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TheStrangeLoop 2012 in St. Louis

The video from my talk at TheStrangeLoop conference late last year has been released as a video on InfoQ. The talk gives an overview of the design decisions behind River Trail but also serves well as a general introduction to the API. Enjoy!

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IFL 2012 in Oxford, UK

I have the great pleasure to serve as a program committee member for this year’s International Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages. IFL is a long running series of workshops that brings together researchers and practitioners in the broad area of functional programming. It was the first conference I have ever attended and the first to accept one of my papers for publication.

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