Every week, Dr. Battle assigns a paper to read to the Voyager team. After reading through the paper, we need to brainstorm and write a summary of the key takeaways from the paper, and we review it altogether in the following meeting. This week, we were assigned a paper on database optimization tool, dubbed Khameleon.

In general, interactive data visualization and exploration (DVE) applications suffer from network delays a lot. Thus, generally, a technique called prefetching is used. Prefeteching is an action of caching the responses for predicted requests beforehand. Khameleon also is a frame that uses prefetching mechanism, but it “continuously and aggressively hedges across a large set of potential requests” and “shields developers from joint optimization problem” according to Mohammed et al.

Also, all of the dependencies that I have updated need to be merged with the master branch of Voyager repository, so I was asked to make a pull request. Because the process of updating outdated dependencies is very complicated, there are not that many dependencies that I updated to the latest version. I might discuss the dependencies as one of the achievements during this DREU program since this also taught me more about Git and GitHub, such as GitHub Actions.