Derek Murray is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google in Redwood City with 18 years of experience and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He specializes in ML systems and TensorFlow internals, turning research models into production-grade, high-performance implementations. An active open-source contributor to tensorflow, google-research and DeepRec, he has improved data pipelines, migrated deprecated TF APIs, and optimized core tensor operations and execution engine locking to boost efficiency. Derek is known for digging into low-level bottlenecks—e.g., ConvertToCooTensorOp, FrameState::GetIteration, and scalar tensor wrapping—so research code runs reliably at scale.
An Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Everyone
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:4 reviews, 1170 commits, 189 PRs in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Derek focused on optimizing the performance of the `ConvertToCooTensorOp` operation, addressing computational and allocation issues. They implemented several improvements, including conditional gain-rescaling avoidance and efficient handling of scalar weights. Furthermore, the user made improvements in the code for extracting row IDs from SparseTensor. These changes demonstrate a strong understanding of performance optimization techniques within the TensorFlow framework.
DeepRec is a high-performance recommendation deep learning framework based on TensorFlow. It is hosted in incubation in LF AI & Data Foundation.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:13 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Derek primarily focused on optimizing and refactoring core components of the deep learning framework, specifically related to tensor operations and execution efficiency. They optimized the tensor-wrapping of scalar values within the CPU, making it more efficient. Furthermore, the user improved performance in the execution engine by optimizing the FrameState::GetIteration() function, which reduces the time spent under the lock within ExecutorState::PropagateOutputs(). These changes indicate an effort to improve performance in the framework.
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