Título: Two Examples of Empirical Analysis to Understand Adoption: GraphQL Schemas and GasTokens in the Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract:
This talk provides an overview of two different examples of the use of empirical analysis to understand the adoption characteristics of specific technologies.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that has been increasingly adopted by Web developers since its specification was open sourced in 2015. The GraphQL framework lets API clients tailor data requests by using queries that return JSON objects described using GraphQL Schema. The first part of this talk (joint work with Yun Wan Kim at UofT and Olaf Hartig at Linkoping University) describes data analysis results characterizing GraphQL Schemas in open code repositories and package registries. This empirical study identifies over 20K GraphQL-related projects in publicly accessible repositories, complemented by finding 37K dependent packages and repositories in package registries.

GasTokens are created by smart contracts executing in the Ethereum blockchain to support a form of transaction fee pre-payment. Even though GasTokens had a period of significant activity on Ethereum (regularly surpassing half of the overall weekly smart contract creation and destruction activities), few systematic studies have been conducted on GasToken usage and its effect on the blockchain network. The second part of this talk (joint work with Lixuan Luo at UofT) focuses on understanding the adoption of GasTokens on Ethereum since May of 2020. We analyze the usage patterns, report price findings, and compare the fees paid by users submitting transactions that create and destroy GasTokens to the fees paid by all the transactions in the network. We characterize the benefits obtained by GasToken transaction senders and report the impact of GasToken creations and destructions on the major mining pools.

Bio: Mariano Consens research interests are in the areas of Data Management and the Web, with a focus on graph data, analytics and ML, semantic data, searching, and autonomic systems. He has over 80 publications, including journal publications selected from best conference papers and several patents. Mariano received his PhD and MSc degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and a Computer Systems Engineer degree from the Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay. Consens is a University of Toronto faculty member and a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Center for Advanced Studies in Toronto. In addition, he has been active in the software industry as a founder and CTO of a couple of software startups, as well as a Visiting Scientist at Yahoo! Research.