UWSpace

UWSpace is the University of Waterloo’s institutional repository for the free, secure, and long-term home of research produced by faculty, students, and staff.

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Recent Submissions

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    Indigenous Data Sovereignty Data Storage Analysis Project
    (Animikii, 2026) Doctor, Jeff
    The objective of this report is to develop materials and recommendations in support of meeting the University of Waterloo Research Data Management Institutional Strategy & Implementation Plan. These materials and recommendations will be used to build out further activities and deliverables to meet the University’s commitments to respecting Indigenous data sovereignty, defined as: "the authority of Indigenous peoples, Nations and communities over their own data, how their data is framed, and how their data is managed. The University of Waterloo respects and recognizes the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples, Nations, and communities over research data produced by, with, for, and about them. This includes sovereignty over the collection, use, control, access, possession, and sharing of these data." This may seem like a simple endeavor, however none of the major Canadian research data repositories were created with Indigenous rights, much less Indigenous participation, in mind. Indigenous rights and wellbeing have been an afterthought in the dominant research community. To remedy this situation, we recommend that the university establishes a set of protocols for Waterloo-based data storage options that are owned and operated by the University that align with relevant Indigenous data sovereignty principles: 1. Be FAIR and CARE 2. Evaluate policies, practices, relationships, and data infrastructure for alignment to the CARE Principles via the CARE Data Maturity Model 3. Maintain situational awareness of Indigenous relations and rights 4. Engage in consistent outreach activities with appropriate Indigenous Peoples 5. Improve repository protocols so they are compatible with Indigenous data sovereignty principles 6. Ensure technology development and maintenance is adequately prioritized and resourced 7. Prioritize using software designed to respect Indigenous data sovereignty
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    MADBench - Measuring Agentic DBMS: Quantifying the Protocol Tax of MCP-Mediated Query Workloads
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-07) Ahmed, Yaseen
    Large language model agents increasingly access relational databases through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a tool-calling standard in which the model discovers tool definitions from a middleware server, issues calls through it, and consumes query results serialized as text into its context window. Under this architecture, every database interaction pays costs that classical database clients do not: tool discovery, server lifecycle, result serialization, transport, and context-window consumption. Existing agent benchmarks report end-to-end task scores and therefore cannot attribute these costs to the layer that causes them. This thesis presents MADBench, a benchmark that measures and decomposes this overhead, termed the Protocol Tax: end-to-end interaction time minus raw database execution time. OpenTelemetry instrumentation splits the tax into seven protocol phases (discovery, lifecycle, handover, serialization, parsing, transport, and teardown), with the unattributed residual held below 5% of wall-clock time on 98.7% of runs. Two measurement tracks separate protocol effects from model effects. Track A replays fixed TPC-H queries through three open-source MCP servers over PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DuckDB at scale factors 1 through 10, under paired warm-start and cold-start conditions, collecting 5,378 traces with no model in the loop. Track B runs a fixed LLM agent over 30 pre-registered natural-language questions on the same server-backend grid, yielding 1,080 attempts scored against gold SQL results. Three findings emerge. First, Protocol Tax spans three orders of magnitude on identical queries, from 10⁻³ of database execution time for an in-process engine to 3× it for a subprocess server on PostgreSQL; the dominant cost is the server's process model, not its wire format. Second, protocol speed does not predict agent success: the server with the lowest Protocol Tax ranks last in agent completion, and DuckDB carries 112× less protocol overhead than the client-server backends yet finishes mid-pack. Third, completion is instead governed by result-payload compactness and schema-metadata quality; one server-backend pairing collapses from 61.1% to 17.8% completion between scale factors when verbose query results overflow the model's context window. The benchmark, pre-registered workload, and full trace corpus are released to support reproduction and extension.
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    Reclaiming the Rails: Reimagining Urban Mobility through Toronto's Midtown Freight Corridor
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-10-07) Markham, Isabella
    Canadian Pacific's Midtown freight corridor runs east west through some of Toronto's densest and fastest growing neighbourhoods without stopping once. This thesis proposes its adaptive reuse as a Regional Express Rail passenger line, running from Kipling to McCowan across eleven stations. At a time when Toronto struggles to keep pace with its demand for transit and mobility needs are shifting, reconsidering how the city builds transit is urgent. The city's rail corridors are some of its most overlooked and underutilized assets. This thesis seeks to understand how to leverage this existing infrastructure to serve a growing and more distributed city. The thesis acknowledges the tensions of reusing infrastructure originally intended for a different purpose. It argues that the conversion of the corridor is only as successful as its stations, as they are what connects this adapted infrastructure to the broader urban fabric. It proposes a spatial solution across eleven schematic urban proposals that each respond to the conditions of its context through existing and planned transit connections, surrounding urban fabric, topography, and development potential. Station placement and integration are crucial in determining whether the corridor is feasible for adaptation. This thesis looks ahead to the future city, prioritizing how we can most effectively use infrastructure to serve the 21st century city and beyond.
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    State-complexity hierarchies of uniform languages of alphabet-size length
    (University of Waterloo, 2008-03-11) Brzozowski, Janusz; Konstantinidis, Stavros
    We study the state complexity of a special class of simple languages. If A is an alphabet of k letters, then a k-language is a nonempty set of words of length k, that is, a uniform language of length k. We show that every k-language of maximal state complexity is also a uniform language of length k of maximal state complexity. Moreover, we prove that, for every i between the minimal and the maximal state complexities, there is a language of complexity i. The proof is constructive: for each i we exhibit a language of complexity i. We introduce a family of "pi automata" accepting languages whose words are permutations of the alphabet; the complexities of these languages form a complete hierarchy between k^2-k+3 and 2^k+1. We start with an automaton with k^2-k+3 states and show that states can be added one at a time, until the automaton has 2^k+1 states. We construct another family of automata, based on k-ary trees, whose languages define a complete hierarchy of complexities between 2^k+1 and the maximal complexity. Here, we start with an automaton with the maximal complexity. Here, we start with an automaton with the maximal number of states and remove states one at a time, until an automaton with 2^k+1 and the maximal complexity. Here, we start with an automaton with the maximal number of states and remove states one at a time, until an automaton with 2^k+1 states is reached.
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    Extending typestate analysis to multiple interacting objects
    (Univeristy of Waterloo, 2008-03-25) Naeem, Nomair A.; Lhotak, Ondrej
    This paper extends static typestate analysis to temporal specifications of groups of interacting objects, which are expressed using tracematches. Unlike typestate, a tracematch state may change due to operations on any of a set of objects bound by the tracematch. The paper proposes a lattice-based operational semantics equivalent to the original tracematch semantics but better suited to statis analysis. The paper defines a statis analysis that computes precise local points-to sets and tracks the flow of individual objects, thereby enabling strong state updates of the tracematch state. The analysis has been proved sound with respect to the semantics. A context-sensitive version of the analysis has been implemented as instances of the IFDS and IDE algorithms. The analysis was evaluated on tracematches used in earlier work and found to be very precise. Remaining imprecisions could be eliminated with more precise modeling of references from the heap and of exceptional control flow.