Jon Howell
I am a researcher in the
Systems and Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research.
Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation
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
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
Jeremy Elson,
Handling Flash Crowds from Your
Garage
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track 2008: To appear.
Miguel Elías, Jeremy Elson,
Do
I live in a flood basin?: Synthesizing ten thousand maps.
CHI 2008: 255-264. Related
materials.
Jeremy Elson, John R. Douceur,
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,
Protection and communication
abstractions for web browsers in MashupOS.
SOSP 2007: 1-16
MashupOS:
Operating System Abstractions for Client Mashups
HotOS 2007.
Jacob R. Lorch, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie
Chaiken, John R. Douceur,
The SMART way to migrate replicated stateful
services.
EuroSys 2006: 103-115
John R. Douceur,
Byzantine Fault Isolation in the Farsite
Distributed File System
International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS) 2006
John R. Douceur,
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,
FARSITE: Federated, Available, and Reliable
Storage for an Incompletely Trusted Environment.
OSDI 2002
Atul Adya,
Cooperative Task Management Without Manual
Stack Management.
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track 2002: 289-302
A
Formal Semantics for SPKI.
ESORICS 2000: 140-158
Practical
Mobile Robot Self-Localization.
ICRA 2000: 3485-3492
End-to-End
Authorization.
OSDI 2000: 151-164
Paul Dourish, W. Keith Edwards,
A programming
model for active documents.
UIST 2000: 41-50
Matthew T. Mason, Dinesh K. Pai, Daniela Rus,
Experiments
with Desktop Mobile Manipulators
ISER 1999: 37-46
Hey,
You Got Your Compiler in My Operating System!
Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems 1999: 122-
Straightforward
Java Persistence Through Checkpointing.
Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Persistence and Java, 1998:
322-334
Unrefereed Publications
William J. Bolosky, John R. Douceur,
The Farsite project: a retrospective.
Operating Systems Review 41(2): 17-26 (2007)
Jeremy Elson,
MapCruncher: integrating the world's
geographic information.
Operating Systems Review 41(2): 50-59 (2007)
John Douceur,
Replicated
Virtual Machines
MSR-TR-2005-119, September 2005
John Douceur,
Black Box
Leases
MSR-TR-2005-120, September 2005
Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R.
Douceur,
Load
Management in a Large-Scale Decentralized File System
MSR-TR-2004-60, July 2004
Correctness of
Paxos with Replica-Set-Specific Views
MSR-TR-2004-45, June 2004
John Douceur,
Scalable
Byzantine-Fault-Quantifying Clock Synchronization
MSR-TR-2003-67, October 2003
Last modified May 28,
2008.