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Publications

Publications by João Alexandre Saraiva

2015

Design and Implementation of Queries for Model-Driven Spreadsheets

Authors
Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Mendes, J; Pereira, R; Saraiva, J;

Publication
Central European Functional Programming School, CEFP 2013

Abstract
This paper presents a domain-specific querying language for model-driven spreadsheets. We briefly show the design of the language and present in detail its implementation, from the denormalization of data and translation of our user-friendly query language to a more efficient query, to the execution of the query using Google. To validate our work, we executed an empirical study, comparing QuerySheet with an alternative spreadsheet querying tool, which produced positive results.

2014

Smelling Faults in Spreadsheets

Authors
Abreu, R; Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Martins, P; Perez, A; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2014 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION (ICSME)

Abstract
Despite being staggeringly error prone, spreadsheets are a highly flexible programming environment that is widely used in industry. In fact, spreadsheets are widely adopted for decision making, and decisions taken upon wrong (spreadsheet-based) assumptions may have serious economical impacts on businesses, among other consequences. This paper proposes a technique to automatically pinpoint potential faults in spreadsheets. It combines a catalog of spreadsheet smells that provide a first indication of a potential fault, with a generic spectrum-based fault localization strategy in order to improve (in terms of accuracy and false positive rate) on these initial results. Our technique has been implemented in a tool which helps users detecting faults. To validate the proposed technique, we consider a well-known and well-documented catalog of faulty spreadsheets. Our experiments yield two main results: we were able to distinguish between smells that can point to faulty cells from smells and those that are not capable of doing so; and we provide a technique capable of detecting a significant number of errors: two thirds of the cells labeled as faulty are in fact (documented) errors.

2016

User-friendly spreadsheet querying: an empirical study

Authors
Pereira, R; Saraiva, J; Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP;

Publication
Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Pisa, Italy, April 4-8, 2016

Abstract
Spreadsheets are nowadays used in a variety of contexts, including in in manipulatin large and complex data. This data is stored in a large unstructured matrix, which is hard to understand and to manipulate. Recent research has been done to manipulate and query such unstructured data, namely by proposing different query approaches to spreadsheets. In this paper we present an empirical study evaluating three recent query approaches to spreadsheets assessing their usage to query spreadsheets. The results of our study show that the end-users' productivity increases when using visual, model-driven queries are used. © 2016 ACM.

2016

Memoized Zipper-Based Attribute Grammars

Authors
Fernandes, JP; Martins, P; Pardo, A; Saraiva, J; Viera, M;

Publication
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES (SBLP 2016)

Abstract
Attribute Grammars are a powerfull, well-known formalism to implement and reason about programs which, by design, are conveniently modular. In this work we focus on a state of the art Zipper-based embedding of Attribute Grammars and further improve its performance through controlling attribute (re)evaluation by using memoization techniques. We present the results of our optimization by comparing their impact in various implementations of different, well-studied Attribute Grammars.

2013

Querying Model-Driven Spreadsheets

Authors
Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Mendes, J; Pereira, R; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2013 IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON VISUAL LANGUAGES AND HUMAN-CENTRIC COMPUTING (VL/HCC 2013)

Abstract
Spreadsheets are being used with many different purposes that range from toy applications to complete information systems. In any of these cases, they are often used as data repositories that can grow significantly. As the amount of data grows, it also becomes more difficult to extract concrete information out of them. This paper focuses on the problem of spreadsheet querying. In particular, we propose an expressive and composable technique where intuitive queries can be defined. Our approach builds on a model-driven spreadsheet development environment, and queries are expressed referencing entities in the model of a spreadsheet instead of in its actual data. Finally, the system that we have implemented relies on Google's query function for spreadsheets.

2013

Using Cloogy and Case Based Reasoning to Identify Electrical Consumptions

Authors
Damasceno, A; Carreiro, A; Saraiva, J; Neto, J; Landeck, J;

Publication
Advances in Data Mining, 13th Industrial Conference, ICDM 2013, New York, NY, USA, July 2013. Workshop Proceedings

Abstract

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