a photo of the author
Scott Kovach
dskovach@stanford.edu
github: kovach
gates 494

I'm a computer science Ph.D. student at Stanford advised by Fredrik Kjolstad.

I'm interested in how programming languages help people learn and think, and how we might achieve the old dynamic media dream. I work on domain-specific languages that emphasize relations and rules.

My current project is a language for interactive computations inspired by board games called Turn.

Previously I've worked on Etch, a compiler for tensor arithmetic, relational queries, and more. We use the notion of indexed streams to abstract the implementation details of sparse computations and mechanically verify our composition methods.

I like functional programming, relational languages, algebraic optimizations, naive realism, and games.

Notes

2025cat-on-shelf Parsing
2024Generic Join
2024There's no such thing as auto-formalization
2024Dissolve the World with Slime Magic
2023Joins and Polynomials (pdf)
2023The AGM Query Bound (pdf)

Preprints

(2025) Fast Collection Operations from Indexed Stream Fusion

Publications

(PLDI23) Indexed Streams: A Formal Intermediate Representation for Fused Contraction Programs
Scott Kovach, Praneeth Kolichala, Tiancheng Gu, Fredrik Kjolstad

Presentations

2023Sparse Tensor Workshop
2017LIVE 2017 at SPLASH
more... my cat goose