[CS] Junwen Yang Candidacy Exam/Feb 11, 2021

[pbaclawski at uchicago.edu]

This is an announcement of Junwen Yang's Candidacy Exam.
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Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021

Time: 8:00AM CST

Location: via zoom
https://zoom.us/j/91973825795?pwd=bXp0MFpYeWtFR0lWT3JueG1pVVNXZz09
Meeting ID: 919 7382 5795
Passcode: iZDP1Y

Candidacy Candidate: Junwen Yang

Title: Improving Performance And Correctness Of Database-Backed Web Application

Abstract: 
Modern web applications have to manage a lot of user data and often use a three-stack architecture: (1) a web interface developed by markup language like HTML (2) application logic developed by traditional object-oriented languages, and (3) a database management system (DBMS) that maintains persistent data.
 
Under this architecture, there are common understanding gaps between web designer and application developers and database engine. As a result, performance and correctness problems are common.
 
To tackle performance problems, I did one of the first studies to understand why real-world web applications are slow. Guided by that study, I used cross-stack analysis to synthesize efficient web pages, to automatically detect inefficiency in data processing code, and to help database optimization using application knowledge. My tools have found thousands of performance issues. To tackle correctness problems in web applications, I investigated how data constraints could be inconsistent across web interface, application, and database, and how to solve these problems.

Advisors: Shan Lu

Committee Members: Shan Lu, Aaron Elmore, Ravi Chugh