I am a researcher working in the Distributed Systems and Security group at Microsoft Research, which is part of the larger Systems and Networking research area. I have a BS from Johns Hopkins University (1996), an MS from the University of Southern California (2000) and a Ph.D. from UCLA (2003). I've worked at MSR since 2004.
My Ph.D. was in the area of Sensor Networks, with my advisor Prof. Deborah Estrin. I continued to work in this area for a couple of years after getting my degree, and initially joined MSR's Networked Embedded Computing group. I moved into my current group as my interests shifted back towards more Internet-centric distributed systems.
There's more information available on my personal web page.
I can be emailed at jelson at the domain microsoft.com.
Current and Recent Projects
The Utility CoProcessor: Harness the power of massively parallel computing at timescales (10 seconds) previously not possible for general-purpose programs.
Asirra: A Human Interactive Proof (CAPTCHA) that asks users to prove they are human by identifying photos of cats and dogs -- made possible by our unique partnership with Petfinder.com.
XAX: Safely run x86-native code as a browser extension, using "PicoProcesses" -- a micro-virtualization framework.
MapCruncher: Easily create scalable map overlays for Virtual Earth using your own maps.
- Jon Howell, Jeremy Elson, Bryan Parno, and John R. Douceur, Missive: Fast Appliance Launch From an Untrusted Buffer Cache, no. MSR-TR-2013-9, 30 January 2013
- Edmund B. Nightingale, Jeremy Elson, Jinliang Fan, Owen Hofmann, Jon Howell, and Yutaka Suzue, Flat Datacenter Storage, in 10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2012), USENIX, October 2012
- Johnson Apacible, Rich Draves, Jeremy Elson, Jinliang Fan, Owen Hofmann, Jon Howell, Ed Nightingale, Reuben Olinsky, and Yutaka Suzue, MinuteSort with Flat Datacenter Storage, no. MSR-TR-2012-126, 15 May 2012
- John R. Douceur, Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, and Jacob R. Lorch, The Utility Coprocessor: Massively Parallel Computation from the Coffee Shop, in Proceedings of the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 22 June 2010
- James Mickens, Jeremy Elson, and Jon Howell, Mugshot: Deterministic Capture and Replay for JavaScript Applications, in Proceedings of NSDI, USENIX, April 2010
- James Mickens, Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, and Jay Lorch, Crom: Faster Web Browsing Using Speculative Execution, in Proceedings of NSDI, USENIX, April 2010
- Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell, Refactoring Human Roles Solves Systems Problems, in Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud), USENIX, 15 June 2009
- John R. Douceur, Jeremy Elson, Jon Howell, 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
- 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
- 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
- Jeremy Elson and Andrew Parker, Tinker: A Tool for Designing Data-Centric Sensor Networks, in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2006), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., July 2006
Older Publications
My personal Publications Page has publications from my graduate student days.
