CSAIL Graduate Student

Evan Jones

Where did you grow up?

Calgary, Canada.

What was your academic path before coming to grad school at MIT?

I have Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada. When I was finishing my Master's degree, I was pretty tired of being in school, and was convinced that I wanted to go work in industry. While I was applying to jobs, I figured that I might as well keep my options open. I applied to my top choice school: MIT. To my surprise, I was accepted.

I went to MIT for the PhD visit weekend, which was a great look at what my life might look like if I chose to do that. At the same time, I ended up with an offer to go work for Google in New York. I really wanted to defer my acceptance for a year, but MIT will only let you defer for one semester. I ended up declining MIT's offer and went to New York instead. I reapplied to MIT for the following year, and thankfully was accepted again.

Why did you choose to come to MIT as opposed to the other schools you applied to?

The reason that MIT was my top choice is primarily because MIT's faculty and students are doing interesting work in my area of interest. In fact, there are lots of faculty and students doing work that I find interesting. That is better than some other schools where I can only say that about one or maybe two research groups. Secondly, I didn't want to do a PhD at Waterloo. It is a great school, but I needed a new experience. Finally, I like living in Boston. It isn't as good as New York, but it is pretty nice.

When did you join a grad program at MIT, and what department are you in?

I started my PhD in Computer Science this fall: September 2007.

What are you working on right now and why are you passionate about it?

One of my big challenges is that I am curious and interested in too many things. I am interested in anything that can be considered computer systems: operating systems, networks, compilers, and similar pieces of low-level software infrastructure. However, my primary research interest is in distributed systems. I am interested in designing software that overcomes the inherent challenges in building systems that span multiple computers. Dealing with problems like failures, concurrency, and latency is difficult. This space is also becoming more important. There are few important applications today that don't talk across a network. I believe that in the future, there will be zero new applications that don't involve a network. All of these software systems need better tools and techniques to make it easier to design and implement something that works.

What social or technical impact do you hope your research will have in coming years?

The impact of my research will be completely hidden and invisible. My work lives in the server rooms and data centers scattered all over the planet. Ideally, my work will help people design and build reliable systems that take advantage of the resources of many computers connected over networks. My interest is in building tools that make software robust to failures, require less work to manage, and easily serve any number of users, from dozens to millions.

What effect do you think computer science and artificial intelligence will have in individual's lives and communities in the next decade?

The dramatic changes that computer science might produce over the next decade will come from creative people who can see interesting ways of applying computers to solve problems in a new way. Rich areas are visualizing, processing, and searching large amounts of data. For example, I never would have imagined that a map application would be useful until they were accessible in my web browser. Now I don't know how people ever navigated cities without them. Personally, I'm not the kind of person who will create one of these applications. I am much more interested in the infrastructure that makes the software possible.

In the area that I work, I believe that over the next decade, all important software will run on multiple computers that are connected via a network. Many services will be outsourced to dedicated service providers, and will be delivered over the Internet.

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