Jon Howell

I am a researcher in the Systems and Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research.

Jon Howell

Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation

One Microsoft Way, Building 99/2376

Redmond, WA 98052

USA

howell@microsoft.com

Bio

I am currently working at the intersection of utility computing and web-delivered applications.

I co-developed Asirra and InkblotPasswords. I also co-developed the MapCruncher tool for importing map content onto the web; it now ships from Microsoft.

My first project at MSR was the Farsite distributed filesystem. I focused on practical techniques for managing concurrency in distributed systems programming, including using formal specification to design the distributed directory service for FARSITE, which must be simultaneously scalable, consistent, and Byzantine-fault-isolating [OSDI2006], using atomic actions as a practical technique to simplify the management of local concurrency, and clarifying the relationship between cooperative threads and event-driven code [Usenix2002].

After grad school, I spent a year at Consystant, a startup company in Kirkland, studying and modeling language semantics.

I developed my dissertation at Dartmouth working with David Kotz on distributed naming and security. I extended a formal system to model the transitive delegations of the Simple Public Key Infrastructure (SPKI). The result is a system that can reason about authorization across administrative boundaries, without a centralized notion of a domain that contains a list of people or principals. I also spent far too much time in the robotics lab, diddling with hardware and mapping algorithms.

Jon enjoys flying airplanes, bicycling, and playing puzzlehunt.

Refereed Publications

Peter Pesti, Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, Drew Steedly, Matt Uyttendaele
Low-cost orthographic imagery.
To appear, ACM GIS 2008.

John R. Douceur, Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, Jacob R. Lorch
Leveraging legacy code to deploy desktop applications on the web.
To appear, OSDI 2008.

Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell
Handling Flash Crowds from Your Garage.
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track 2008.

Miguel Elías, Jeremy Elson, Danyel Fisher, Jon Howell
Do I live in a flood basin?: Synthesizing ten thousand maps.
CHI 2008: 255-264. Related materials.

Jeremy Elson, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, Jared Saul
Asirra: a CAPTCHA that exploits interest-aligned manual image categorization.
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2007: 366-374

Helen J. Wang, Xiaofeng Fan, Jon Howell, Collin Jackson
Protection and communication abstractions for web browsers in MashupOS.

SOSP 2007: 1-16

Jon Howell, Collin Jackson, Helen J. Wang, Xiaofeng Fan.
MashupOS: Operating System Abstractions for Client Mashups.
HotOS 2007.

Jacob R. Lorch, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell
The SMART way to migrate replicated stateful services.
EuroSys 2006: 103-115

John R. Douceur, Jon Howell
Byzantine Fault Isolation in the Farsite Distributed File System
International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS) 2006

John R. Douceur, Jon Howell
Distributed Directory Service in the Farsite File System.
OSDI 2006: 321-334 2002

Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Miguel Castro, Gerald Cermak, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, Jacob R. Lorch, Marvin Theimer, Roger Wattenhofer
FARSITE: Federated, Available, and Reliable Storage for an Incompletely Trusted Environment.
OSDI 2002

Atul Adya, Jon Howell, Marvin Theimer, William J. Bolosky, John R. Douceur
Cooperative Task Management Without Manual Stack Management.
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track 2002: 289-302

Jon Howell, David Kotz
A Formal Semantics for SPKI.
ESORICS 2000: 140-158

Jon Howell, Bruce Randall Donald
Practical Mobile Robot Self-Localization.
ICRA 2000: 3485-3492

Jon Howell, David Kotz
End-to-End Authorization.
OSDI 2000: 151-164

Paul Dourish, W. Keith Edwards, Jon Howell, Anthony LaMarca, John Lamping, Karin Petersen, Michael Salisbury, Douglas B. Terry, James D. Thornton
A programming model for active documents.
UIST 2000: 41-50