UWSpace

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Recent Submissions

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    Big open data for enviroinmental information systems
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-12-04) Cowan, Donald; Alencar, Paulo; McGarry, Fred; Palmer, R. Mark; Boston, Trevor; Rozanski, Rigel
    The frequency of extreme weather events has accelerated, an apparent outcome of progressive climate change. Excess water is a significant consequence of these events and is now the leading cause of insurance claims for infrastructure and property damage. Governments recognize that plans for growth must reflect communities needs, strengths and opportunities while balancing the cumulative effects of economic growth with environmental concerns. For such a process to be effective it will be necessary to develop and operate cumulative effect decision support software (CEDSS) tools, and to work closely with all levels of government including watershed management authorities (WMAs) that supply environmental data. Such co-operation and sharing will require a new open and big data information-sharing platform, which is described in this paper as an open and big data platform for environmental analysis and management.
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    Comparison of affect-control theoretic agents and humans in the prisoner's dilemma
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-11-02) Jung, Joshua D. A.; Hoey, Jesse; Morgan, Jonathan H.; Schroder, Tobias; Wolf, Ingo
    Symbolic interactionist principles of sociology are based on the idea that human action is guided by culturally shared symbolic representations of identities, behaviours, situations and emotions. Shared linguistic, paralinguistic, or kinesic elements allow human to co-ordinate action by enacting identities in social situations. Structures of identity-based interactions can lead to the enactment of social orders that solve social dilemmas (e.g., by promoting co-operation). Our goal is to build an artificial agent that mimics the identity-based interactions of humans, and to compare networks of such agents to human networks. In this paper, we take a first step in this direction, and describe a study in which humans played a repeated prisoner's dilemma game against other humans, or against one of three artificial agents (bots). One of the bots has an explicit representation of identity (for self and other), and attempts to optimise with respect to this representation. We compare the human play against bots to human play against humans, and show how the identity-based bots exhibits the most human-like behaviour.
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    NoSE: Schema design for NoSQL applications
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-10-19) Mior, Michael J.; Salem, Kenneth; Aboulnaga, Ashraf
    Database design is critical for high performance in relational databases and many tools exist to aid application designers in selecting an appropriate schema. While the problem of schema optimization is also highly relevant for NoSQL databases, existing tools for relational databases are inadequate for this setting. Application designers wishing to use a NoSQL database instead rely on rules of thumb to select an appropriate schema. We present a system for recommending database schemas for NoSQL applications. Our cost-based approach uses a novel binary integer programming formulation to guide the mapping from the application's conceptual data model to a database schema. We implemented a prototype of this approach for the Cassandra extensible record store. Our prototype, the NoSQL Schema Evaluator (NoSE) is able to capture rules of thumb used by expert designers without explicitly encoding the rules. Automating the design process allows NoSE to produce efficient schemas and to examine more alternatives than would be possible with a manual rule-based approach.
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    Feedback-directed instrumentation for deployed JavaScript applications
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-09-08) Madsen, Magnus; Tip, Frank; Andreasen, Esben; Sen, Koushik; Moller, Anders
    Many bugs in JavaScript applications manifest themselves as objects that have incorrect property values when a failure occurs. For this type of error, stack traces and log files are often insufficient for diagnosing problems. In such cases, it is helpful for developers to know the control flow path from the creation of an object to a crashing statement. Such crash paths are useful for understanding where the object originated and whether any properties of the object were corrupted since its creation. We present a feedback-directed instrumentation technique for computing crash paths that allows the instrumentation overhead to be distributed over a crowd of users and to reduce it for users who do not encounter the crash. We implemented our technique in a tool, Crowdie, and evaluated it on 10 real-world issues for which error messages and stack traces are insufficient to isolate the problem. Our results show that feedback-directed instrumentation requires 5% to 25% of the program to be instrumented, that the same crash must be observed three to ten times to discover the crash path, and that feedback-directed instrumentation typically slows down execution by a factor 2x-9x compared to 8x-90x for an approach where applications are fully instrumented.
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    A qualitative exploratory study of how OSS developers define code review quality
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-09-11) Kononenko, Oleksii; Baysal, Olga
    In a large, long-lived project, an effective code review process is key to ensuring the long-term quality of the code base. In this work, we study code review practices of a large, open source project, and we investigate how the developers themselves perceive code review quality. We present a qualitative study that summarizes the results from a survey of 88 Mozilla core developers. The results provide developer insights into how they define review quality, what factors contribute to how they evaluate submitted code, and what challenges they face when performing review tasks. We found that the review quality is primarily associated with the thoroughness of the feedback, the reviewer's familiarity with the code, and the perceived quality of the code itself. Also, we found that while different factors are perceived to contribute to the review quality, reviewers often find it difficult to keep their technical skills up-to-date, manage personal priorities, and mitigate context switching.