Jeremy Elson's Writings

Refereed (peer reviewed)
Unrefereed Technical Reports and Notes
Presentations
Humor
Non-Fiction
Fiction and Poetry

Under Submission

Wireless Sensor Networks: A Bridge to the Physical World

Jeremy Elson and Deborah Estrin
Chapter in Wireless Sensor Networks, Kluwer, 2004, in press.

Optimal and Global Time Synchronization in Sensornets

Richard Karp, Jeremy Elson, Deborah Estrin, and Scott Shenker
CENS Technical Report 0012, April 10, 2003. Under Submission.

EmStar: An Environment for Developing Wireless Embedded Systems Software

Jeremy Elson, Solomon Bien, Naim Busek, Vladimir Bychkovskiy, Alberto Cerpa, Deepak Ganesan, Lew Girod, Ben Greenstein, Tom Schoellhammer, Thanos Stathopoulos, and Deborah Estrin
CENS Technical Report 0009, March 24, 2003. Under submission.

EmStar: a Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks (also available as PS)

Lewis Girod, Jeremy Elson, Alberto Cerpa, Thanos Stathopoulos, Nithya Ramanathan, Deborah Estrin
To appear in the Proceeding of the 2004 USENIX Technical Conference.
Also published as CENS Technical Report 0034, December 16, 2003.

Coherent Acoustic Array Processing and Localization on Wireless Sensor Networks

J.C. Chen, L. Yip, J. Elson, H. Wang, D. Maniezzo, R.E. Hudson, K. Yao, and D. Estrin
Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 91, No. 8, April 2003

ICAP: The Internet Content Adaptation Protocol, RFC 3507.

Jeremy Elson and Alberto Cerpa, editors. April 2003.

Fine-Grained Network Time Synchronization using Reference Broadcasts (also available as PDF)
Jeremy Elson, Lewis Girod and Deborah Estrin

In Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2002), Boston, MA. December 2002. (Supercedes earlier revisions from May and February 2002.)

Wireless Sensor Networks: A New Regime for Time Synchronization (also available as PDF)
Jeremy Elson and Kay Römer

In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Hot Topics In Networks (HotNets-I), Princeton, New Jersey. October 2002.

Short Paper: A Wireless Time-Synchronized COTS Sensor Platform, Part I: System Architecture (also available as PDF)
Jeremy Elson, Lewis Girod, and Deborah Estrin , appeared with companion paper,
A Wireless Time-Synchronized COTS Sensor Platform, Part II: Applications to Beamforming
H. Wang, L. Yip, D. Maniezzo, J.C. Chen, R.E. Hudson, J. Elson, and K. Yao

In Proceedings of the IEEE CAS Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking, Pasadena, California. September 2002.

Autonomous Position Location in Distributed, Embedded, Wireless Systems
William Merrill, Lewis Girod, Jeremy Elson, Kathy Sohrabi, Fredric Newberg, and William Kaiser

In Proceedings of the IEEE CAS Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking, Pasadena, California. September 2002.

Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks. Available in Postscript and PDF formats.
Jeremy Elson and Deborah Estrin

In Proceedings of the 2001 International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Issues in Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, April 2001, San Francisco, CA, USA, pp. 1965--1970. Also published as as UCLA Computer Science Technical Report 200028.

Random, Ephemeral Transaction Identifiers in Dynamic Sensor Networks. Available in Postscript and PDF formats.
Jeremy Elson and Deborah Estrin

In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21) April 16-19, 2001, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Also published as as UCLA Computer Science Technical Report 200027. An earlier draft of this paper was published as USC CS Technical Report 00-724.

Habitat Monitoring: Application Driver for Wireless Communications Technology. Available in Postscript and PDF formats.
Alberto Cerpa, Jeremy Elson, Deborah Estrin, Lewis Girod, Michael Hamilton, and Jerry Zhao.

In Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Data Communications in Latin America and the Caribbean, 3-5 April, 2001, San Jose, Costa Rica. Also published as UCLA Computer Science Technical Report 200023.

Effects of Detail in Wireless Network Simulation
John Heidemann, Nirupama Bulusu, Jeremy Elson, Chalermek Intanagonwiwat, Kun-chan Lan, Ya Xu, Wei Ye, Deborah Estrin, and Ramesh Govindan

In Proceedings of the SCS Multiconference on Distributed Simulation, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, Society for Computer Simulation. January, 2001. (My contribution to this paper was based on my earlier final project report for CS547)

The development of an ATM--based Radiology Consultation WorkStation for radiotherapy treatment planning.
Kenneth M. Kempner, David Chow, Peter Choyke, Jerome R. Cox, Jr., Jeremy E. Elson, Calvin A. Johnson, Paul Okunieff, Harold Ostrow, John C. Pfeifer, and Robert L. Martino

Appeared in Image Display: Medical Imaging 1997 Conference Proceedings, volume 3031, pp. 500--511. Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, 1997.

Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks (181 + xxi pages, 1.8MB)

Jeremy Elson, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. May 2003.

Locating tiny sensors in time and space: A case study (also available as PDF)
Lewis Girod, Vladimir Bychkovskiy, Jeremy Elson, and Deborah Estrin

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD 2002), Freiburg, Germany. September 2002. Invited paper.

Open Standard Development Platforms for Distributed Sensor Networks
William Merrill, Katayoun Sohrabi, Lewis Girod, Jeremy Elson, Fredric Newberg, and William Kaiser

Published in Proceedings of SPIE AeroSense 2002

Elson, J. Time Synchronization Services for Wireless Sensor Networks (Also in Postscript, PDF). Dissertation Proposal (April 10, 2001)

My official dissertation proposal presented during my oral qualifying exam (see also the presentation, below.)

Alberto Cerpa and Jeremy Elson, editors. NECP: The Network Element Control Protocol (November 1999; last updated March 2000)

Under submission as an Internet-Draft to IETF. This protocol started out as a class project under the direction of Prof. Peter Danzig and later continued under contract from Network Appliance. It is currently supported by NetApp and has been endorsed by a variety of vendors who plan to implement it (or already have).

Simulation of Constant-Distance Robot Following using Radio Proximity Beacons; also available in Postscript format. (December 10, 1999)

Final project report for Gaurav Sukhatme's class, Sensing and Planning in Robotics, Fall 1999. NOTE: The Postscript version is better; some figures did not get translated in the HTML version.

A Totally Unscientific Study of Self-Similar Traffic (May 5, 1999)

A brief study I did on network traffic seen at my workstation.

A Survey of Process Migration Schemes; also available in Postscript format (December 18, 1998)

Final term paper for Advanced Operating Systems, Fall 1998, taught by Katia Obraczka and Cliff Neuman.

Elson, J. TCP/IP-over-ATM Implementation for the Radiology Consultation WorkStation. Technical Report, July 1997. (14 pages) Also available in DVI and Postscript formats.

A description of the (then-)current state of IP-over-ATM standards, including encapsulation methods, call routing, and extensions to TCP required for high performance in a network with a high bandwidth-delay product.

Elson, J. MMXSNMP: A Library for SNMP Control of the MultiMedia eXplorer. Technical Report, October 1997. (70 pages: 30 page user manual and 40 page reference manual)

This is the documentation for a programming library that I developed in the course of my research with the RCWS system described in the previous paper. The Division of Computer Research and Technology presented me with a Special Act Award in recognition of the development of this software and its documentation. The library itself is available; write me email if you're interested.

The full documentation is available as DVI and Postscript. The users' manual only is available as somewhat roughly rendered HTML on the web.

This directory has some of my more recent talks and posters, but unsorted and uncategorized.

Time Synchronization Services for Wireless Sensor Networks. Dissertation Proposal (April 10, 2001)

My official dissertation proposal presented during my oral qualifying exam (see also the paper, above.)

Techniques for Building Long-Lived Wireless Sensor Networks

Jeremy Elson and Deborah Estrin (in collaboration with the SCADDS project, presented to 15th Annual IEEE Computer Communications Workshop (CCW 2000), October 2000.

Simulation of Constant-Distance Robot Following using Radio Proximity Beacons (December 6, 1999)

This is a presentation describing the paper of the same title (above). It was the final project presentation for Gaurav Sukhatme's class, Sensing and Planning in Robotics, Fall 1999.

A Survey of Localization Methods (November 19, 1999)

Similarities and differences among various methods that have evolved for estimating position of objects, from ancient times to today. Surveys celestial navigation, GPS, PinPoint, and a variety of other systems. Given to Deborah Estrin's network seminar class, Fall 1999.

Mobile Robot Control Architectures (September 29, 1999)

A survey of how Sense-Plan-Act controllers contrast with the Brooks subsumption architecture, and Three-Layer-Architectures that attempt to make peace between them. Given as part of Gaurav Sukhatme's class, Sensing and Planning in Robotics, Fall 1999.

NECP: The Network Element Control Protocol

These are various presentations describing the NECP protocol in which Alberto Cerpa and I were two primary designers. (See above for the text of the protocol itself)

• Presentation to the WREC working group of IETF (November 11, 1999)
• Final Report after the first version of the protocol was completed (May 7, 1999)
• Progress Report describing our proposed architecture (March 26, 1999)

Lessons Learned from Real Life (November 11, 1998)

I gave this presentation at one of our weekly lab meetings at USC. It is a description of some of the more interesting lessons about networking that I learned while I was at the NIH.

New Directions in Network Intrusion Detection (October 16, 1998)

A presentation describing some of the problems and solutions in network intrusion detection. Given in the network seminar class taught by Deborah Estrin, Fall 1998.

C++ For C Programmers: A 4-Day Seminar (April 28-May 1, 1998)

When I worked at the NIH, I taught a 4-day C++ seminar a five times. This page has all of my class notes, example programs, and homework assignments (with solutions).

Humor

An Analysis of Author-Specific Email Signature Styles (October 21, 1998)

This is a somewhat esoteric piece of academic humor, but I think it's funny. It is an article that I wrote for submission to ACM SIGSIG, the (fictional) Journal of the ACM Special Interest Group on Signatures.

FOOTOS -- A Guide to Modern Operating Systems (April 1994)

A list of ways to shoot yourself in the foot that I wrote in 1994 and submitted to the rec.humor.funny newsgroup, and which is now one of those things you just see perpetually floating around the net.

A True Sailing Story (Early 1994)

A short and mildly amusing story that was accepted to rec.humor.funny. (This is a link to the r.h.f archives.)

Witty Responses to Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon! (January 24, 1994)

This unique piece of Internet cultural history is something I edited, not wrote. In January of 1994, one Clarence L. Thomas IV (clarence@orion.cc.andrews.edu) spammed nearly 1,000 USENET Newsgroups with an apocolyptic prophesy of the imminent return of Jesus. At the time, such stunts were fairly new (anyone remember the Green Card Lawyers?). I spent the next few days collecting people's funny responses and putting them together into one collection.

Juice Machine Etiquette (February 1991)

This is a short essay I submitted to my high school's underground humor magazine, Grey. One paragraph of this essay has been immortalized on the Internet; the rest has fallen into tragic obscurity.

Non-Fiction

The Scholastic Matchmakers Saga (May 1999)

My friend Josh and I used to run a nationwide computer dating service called Scholastic Matchmakers. This is our story -- an epic of love, money, the Internet, and an eccentric astrologist named Raymond.

The Capital Search Story (June 1998)

Scholastic Matchmakers was successful. The Capital Search wasn't.

The Boggle Solver Story (June 1998)

"There are worse things in life than making a mockery of an online boggle game." -- Josh Adler

Ode de Eau de Zoey (March 31, 1998)

A poem in appreciation of a mystical fragrance.

The Future (March 1992)

I'm not a Star Trek fan these days, but I was in 1992 when Gene Rodenberry died. This is a poem celebrating his life that I wrote for a writing class at Hopkins. (Yes, I know it's corny...)

ajemimah (February 1992)

One day when I was a freshman in the computer science department at Hopkins, I got email from another user on one of the UNIX systems apologizing for slowing down the computer with a job he'd been running. It inspired me to write this short story for my writing class a few weeks later.

Dr. Haber (May 1991)

The only work I've ever had published is this short story I wrote in my senior year of high school. It won some kind of state-wide superintendent's writing award and was included in a book of fiction published by the Maryland superintendent's office in 1991.

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