- Jeremy Elson is credited as one of the founders of the American mudding culture, building the ubiquitous CircleMUD from the earliest DIKU engine, and later, implementing new code in JediMUD. Elson's CircleMUD generic construct became the basis for nearly 75% of the early diku-related code base around the world.
Today, Jeremy works in the Distributed Systems and Security group at Microsoft Research, which is part of the larger Systems and Networking research area. Elson earned 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.
Elson's Ph.D. was in the area of Sensor Networks under the guidance of faculty advisor, Prof. Deborah Estrin. He continued to work in this area for a couple of years after getting his advanced degree, and initially joined MSR's Networked Embedded Computing group. Elson moved into his current group as his interests shifted back towards more Internet-centric distributed systems.
For more information on his career, see Elson's personal web page Elson can be contacted at jelson@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.