jonh : research

This list (obviously) hasn't been updated in a while.

Research Papers and Reports

At Dartmouth, I studied distributed systems; specifically the challenges of naming and security when spanning administrative domains. How can we give users a coherent experience accessing resources not only in a single administrative domain, but all over the globe? The answer seems to be to remove hierarchy from naming and security mechanism. Instead, we depend on arbitrary links forming an arbitrary graph of naming and security relationships. The links reflect real social relationships, so hierarchy will appear only where hierarchical social relationships exist.

My research was funded by the USENIX Association.

  • Dourish, P., Edwards, W.K., Howell, J., LaMarca, A., Lamping, J., Petersen, K., Salisbury, M., Terry, D., and Thornton, J. A Programming Model for Active Documents. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2000), San Diego, CA, pages 41-50.
    [ PDF ]

  • Jon Howell and David Kotz. End-to-end authorization. In Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2000), pages 151-164.
    [ PostScript, PDF, HTML, software ]

  • Jon Howell and David Kotz. A formal semantics for SPKI. In Proceedings of the Sixth European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2000), Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1895, pages 140-158.
    [ PostScript, PDF ]

  • Jon Howell. Naming and sharing resources across administrative boundaries. Ph.D Dissertation, Dartmouth College, May 2000.
    [ PostScript and PDF ]

  • Jon Howell and Keith Kotay. Landmarks for absolute localization. Technical Report TR 2000-364, Dartmouth College, 2000.
    [ Link to PostScript, PDF, and Paper, web page ]

  • Jon Howell and David Kotz. A Formal Semantics for SPKI. (Extended version, 38 pages.) Technical Report TR 2000-363, Dartmouth College, 2000.
    [ Link to PostScript, PDF, and Paper ]

  • Jon Howell and Bruce Randall Donald Practical Mobile Robot Self-Localization. Proceedings, 2000 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Francisco, CA, April 24-28, 2000. To appear.
    [ PostScript, HTML and video ]

  • Jon Howell and David Kotz. An Access-Control Calculus for Spanning Administrative Domains. Technical Report PCS-TR99-361, Dartmouth College, 1999.
    [ Link to PostScript, PDF, and Paper, Poster ]

  • Jon Howell and Mark Montague. Hey, You Got Your Compiler In My Operating System! In the Proceedings of the the Seventh Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VII), March 29-30, 1999.
    [ PostScript, HTML ]

  • Jon Howell Partial Evaluation: Have Your Extensibility, And Specialize It, Too! Accompanying panel presentation, March 29, 1999.
    [ HTML ]

  • Matthew T. Mason, Dinesh K. Pai, Daniela Rus, Jon Howell, Lee R. Taylor, and Michael A. Erdmann. Experiments with Desktop Mobile Manipulators. Proceedings, 1999 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Syndey, Australia, March 26-28, 1999.
    [ Link to PostScript or PDF ]

  • Jon Howell. The Snowflake distributed system. Thesis Proposal, Dartmouth College, January 11, 1999.
    [ PostScript ]

  • Jon Howell. Snowflake: Single-system images across administrative domains. Accompanying talk presented at Dartmouth College, January 11, 1999.
    [ HTML ]

  • Jon Howell and David Kotz. Snowflake: Spanning administrative domains. Technical Report PCS-TR98-343, Dartmouth College, 1998.
    [ Link to PostScript or Paper, HTML ]

  • Jon Howell and Mark Montague. Hey, You Got Your Language In My Operating System! Technical Report PCS-TR98-340, Dartmouth College, 1998.
    [ Link to PostScript or Paper, HTML ]
    Superseded by the HotOS 1999 paper above.

  • Jon Howell. Straightforward Java persistence through checkpointing. In Advances in Persistent Object Systems, Ron Morrison, Mick Jordan, and Malcom Atkinson, eds. Pages 322-334. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. (Presented at the Third International Workshop on Persistence and Java, September 1-3, 1998.)
    [ PostScript, HTML ]

  • Jon Howell. The icee process checkpointer. Accompanying talk presented at the Third International Workshop on Persistence and Java, September 2, 1998.
    [ HTML ]

  • Jon Howell. Snowflake: breaking the administrative boundary. Report posted at USENIX 1998 Technical Conference work-in-progress session, June 1998.
    [ PostScript, HTML ]

  • Jon Howell. An approximate history of distributed systems. Accompanying talk presented at USENIX 1998 Technical Conference work-in-progress session, June 1998.
    [ HTML ]

  • Jon Howell. Straightforward Java persistence through checkpointing. Technical Report PCS-TR98-330, Dartmouth College, 1998.
    [ Link to PostScript or Paper, HTML ]
    Superseded by the paper by the same title at Workshop on Persistence and Java, above.

  • Jon Howell and David Kotz. Snowflake work-in-progress report. Report presented at the Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles work-in-progress session, October 1997.
    [ HTML ]
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