Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher.
Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.
-
Proving the equivalence between SQL queries is a fundamental problem in database research. Existing solvers model queries using algebraic representations and convert such representations into first-order logic formulas so that query equivalence can be verified by solving a satisfiability problem. The main challenge lies in unbounded summations, which appear commonly in a query's algebraic representation in order to model common SQL features, such as projection and aggregate functions. Unfortunately, existing solvers handle unbounded summations in an ad-hoc manner based on heuristics or syntax comparison, which severely limits the set of queries that can be supported. This paper develops a new SQL equivalence prover called SQLSolver, which can handle unbounded summations in a principled way. Our key insight is to use the theory of LIA^*, which extends linear integer arithmetic formulas with unbounded sums and provides algorithms to translate a LIA^* formula to a LIA formula that can be decided using existing SMT solvers. We augment the basic LIA^* theory to handle several complex scenarios (such as nested unbounded summations) that arise from modeling real-world queries. We evaluate SQLSolver with 359 equivalent query pairs derived from the SQL rewrite rules in Calcite and Spark SQL. SQLSolver successfully proves 346 pairs of them, which significantly outperforms existing provers.more » « less
-
Principled accountability for autonomous decision-making in uncertain environments requires distinguishing intentional outcomes from negligent designs from actual accidents. We propose analyzing the behavior of autonomous agents through a quantitative measure of the evidence of intentional behavior. We model an uncertain environment as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). For a given scenario, we rely on probabilistic model checking to compute the ability of the agent to influence reaching a certain event. We call this the scope of agency. We say that there is evidence of intentional behavior if the scope of agency is high and the decisions of the agent are close to being optimal for reaching the event. Our method applies counterfactual reasoning to automatically generate relevant scenarios that can be analyzed to increase the confidence of our assessment. In a case study, we show how our method can distinguish between 'intentional' and 'accidental' traffic collisions.more » « less
An official website of the United States government
