Matt Kane
PhD, 2020

Matt Kane Ph.D. Student Computer Science Department Indiana University, Bloomington markane AT cs . indiana . edu Expand All Sections Collapse All Sections RESEARCH PROJECTS My primary over-reaching concern is related to universal reliable information access. Access that is both available to everyone while also being useful. This may involve helping people become more informed in the political realm regarding information that is often considered hard to get. On a much different level, deceptive and covert language usage in the media and political speeches today has the power to tremendously impact one's ideological standing. I try to help people obtain both information that they may wish for but is hard to find as well as information they never knew existed but which can effectively enhance their critical thinking skills. Following the Dollars: Mapping Political Campaign Contributions in Your Area This is a python CGI script I did for my Fall '05 Security class with Markus Jakobsson that takes a zip code anywhere in the United States and generates a Google Map containing markers for all the political campaign contributors in that area for the 2004 election. Each marker includes name, address, amount and recipient of contribution, and an optional phone number This project is also featured in an Indiana University press release. Free Geocoder: Geocode any Address in the United States The political campain contributions project sparked my interest in geocoder design. This is also a python CGI script that allows you to geocode any number of U.S. street addresses, where the results are given both in text form as well as markers on a Google Map. This project is still in testing, so I'd appreciate feedback. Web Crawler Design You can't gather contribution data for the entire country manually. The crawler I wrote for Following the Dollars was my first ever, and I've since moved on to experiment with additional approaches to web crawling, especially with regard to obtaining email addresses. That is, I try to figure out how easy it is for spammers to gather a large number of email addresses. Obviously it's easy to get email addresses from the source of a web page if the address is clearly listed in plain text. However, how "smart" can we get if we want to display an email address to web site visitors without making things too easy on a web crawler? Initial tests suggest a ridiculous number of people mindlessly throw their entire email in easy-to-mine plain text on their web sites. I did a crawl of all the personal home pages hosted through IUB and one of these days I'll post the results. Web-based GIS Applications I recently became interested in the presentation of geospatial data on the web and am currently involved in a project that will use GIS software to assist biologists in Thailand with enganging in more effective collaboration. In other words, how can we help biologists easily share data with each other, such as geospatial endangered species data, while making the information access easy and intuitive? Developing intelligent tools for information evaluation More information soon. PUBLICATIONS Gasser, M., Hockema, S., & Kane, M. (2005). Information is power: Toward intelligent tools for information access and evaluation. In Proceedings of the world forum on the information society. Cambridge, MN: International Research Foundation for Development. Conference held Nov. 2005 in Tunis, Tunisia. TEACHING EXPERIENCE Associate Instructor for A110, Introduction to Computers and Computing, Fall 2004 Associate Instructor for A216, Digital Multimedia Concepts and Technologies, Spring 2005, Fall 2005 EDUCATION B.A. (May 2004), Illinois College Majors: Philosophy, Computer Science Minors: Religion, Math M.S. in Computer Science (June 2006), Indiana University Bloomington Ph.D. (Expected May, 2020), Indiana University Bloomington