Bio
I am currently working at the intersection of utility computing and web-delivered applications. My most recent public project is Xax, a mechanism for delivering native legacy code as web 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.
Service
WebApps 2010 program committee.
LSAP 2009 workshop program committee, colocated with HPDC 2009.
ICDCS 2009 program committee, Operating Systems and Middleware track.
2009
- Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell, Refactoring Human Roles Solves Systems Problems, in Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), USENIX, 15 June 2009
2008
- Jon Howell, John R. Douceur, Jeremy Elson, and Jacob R. Lorch, Leveraging legacy code to deploy desktop applications on the Web, in Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), USENIX, December 2008
- Peter Pesti, Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, Drew Steedly, and Matt Uyttendaele, Low-Cost Orthographic Imagery, in Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2008
- Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell, Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage, in Proceedings of the 2008 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2008
- Miguel Elias, Jeremy Elson, Danyel Fisher, and Jon Howell, “Do I Live in a Flood Basin?”: Synthesizing Ten Thousand Maps, in Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2008
2007
- Jeremy Elson, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, and Jared Saul, Asirra: A CAPTCHA that Exploits Interest-Aligned Manual Image Categorization, in Proceedings of 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 2007
- William J. Bolosky, John R. Douceur, and Jon Howell, The Farsite project: a retrospective, in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 41 (2), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2007
- Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, and John R. Douceur, MapCruncher: integrating the world's geographic information, in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 41 (2), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2007
- Helen Wang, Xiaofeng Fan, Jon Howell, and Collin Jackson, Protection and communication abstractions for web browsers in MashupOS, in SOSP, 2007
- Jon Howell, Collin Jackson, Helen Wang, and Xiaofeng Fan, MashupOS: Operating System Abstractions for Client Mashups, in Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), 2007
2006
- John R. Douceur and Jon Howell, Distributed directory service in the farsite file system, in Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), USENIX, November 2006
- Jacob R. Lorch, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, and Jon Howell, The SMART way to migrate replicated stateful services, in Proceedings of the 2006 EuroSys Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., Leuven, Belgium, April 2006
- John R. Douceur and Jon Howell, Byzantine fault isolation in the Farsite distributed file system, in Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS), 2006
2002
- Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Miguel Castro, Gerald Cermak, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, Jacob R. Lorch, Marvin Theimer, and Roger P. Wattenhofer, FARSITE: Federated, available, and reliable storage for an incompletely trusted environment, in Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), USENIX, Boston, MA, December 2002
- Atul Adya, Jon Howell, Marvin Theimer, William J. Bolosky, and John R. Douceur, Cooperative Task Management without Manual Stack Management, in Proceedings of USENIX 2002 Annual Technical Conference, USENIX, 2002
- John Douceur and Jon Howell, Replicated Virtual Machines, no. MSR-TR-2005-119, September 2005
- John Douceur and Jon Howell, Black Box Leases, no. MSR-TR-2005-120, September 2005
- Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, and Jacob Lorch, Load Management in a Large-Scale Decentralized File System, no. MSR-TR-2004-60, July 2004
- Jon Howell, Jacob Lorch, and John Douceur, Correctness of Paxos with Replica-Set-Specific Views, no. MSR-TR-2004-45, June 2004
- John Douceur and Jon Howell, Scalable Byzantine-Fault-Quantifying Clock Synchronization, no. MSR-TR-2003-67, October 2003
