Portfolio on R. Miles McCain

Stanford Internet Observatory

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 17:14:47 -0400

Since October 2020, I’ve worked at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) as a technical research assistant. I’ve worked on a combination of technical infrastructure, research projects, and investigations.

CISA

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 17:14:47 -0400

From December 2022 to March 2023, I worked at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) inside National Risk Management Center (NRMC). I worked on election security and risk management. It was a fantastic experience.

Apple

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 03:44:30 +0000

During the summer of 2022, I worked on privacy at Apple, as part of the Privacy Engineering team. It was an amazing experience.

Atlos

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 17:14:47 -0400

Atlos is a platform for open source visual investigations. It helps journalists, human rights organizations, and OSINT investigators collaborate at scale. Atlos is supported by National Geographic, the Brown Institute, and Microsoft.

Stanford University

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 02:41:51 +0000

From September 2020 to June 2024, I was an undergraduate at Stanford. I majored in Symbolic Systems with an individually designed concentration in Digital Safety, Security, and Society.

Synthetic Disinformation

Sun, 02 Jun 2019 22:55:34 +0000

In this multi-part research project, Dr. Sarah Kreps and I studied how synthetic (AI-generated) disinformation can deceive the public and masquerade as reliable, human-written news.

Floodgate Reactor

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 02:54:19 +0000

I was part of Floodgate’s Reactor program. With my good friend Rhythm, I co-created:

An AI meeting notes app called Paxo that we grew to $20k in ARR. We didn’t spend any money on advertising — all our growth was original. We sold the business.
A “semantic observability” tool called Watchpost to give businesses a way to monitor the quality of their generative AI model outputs.
An end-to-end encrypted location sharing app for family safety called Latitude.

Paxo

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 17:14:47 -0400

Paxo is a consumer app that records voice recordings — typically meetings — and turns them into organized, detailed notes.

Shynet

Sat, 09 May 2020 20:55:10 +0000

Shynet is a modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics tool that works without cookies or JS. It’s one of my most successful open source projects. Check out the source code and installation instructions on GitHub.

Recurse Center

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 02:54:19 +0000

I was a member of the Recurse Center’s Spring 1 2020 batch; like all Recursers, I never graduated.

Politics

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 03:44:30 +0000

Starting in the spring of 2019, I worked on the technology subgroup of a major U.S. presidential campaign (mostly working on matters of cyber policy). I worked with the team to draft policy positions, and wrote weekly cyber policy briefings for the candidate.

Speaking

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 04:48:29 +0000

Conferences

DEF CON 31: The Hackers, The Lawyers, and the Defense Fund
RightsCon 2023: Designing Safer Visual Investigations at Scale

Selected Guest Lectures

Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: Large-Scale Open Source Investigations with Atlos (2023)
American University: Investigating Far-Right ‘Alt’ Platforms (2023)
Stanford University: Large-Scale Open Source Investigations with Atlos (in “Online Open Source Investigations”, 2022)

Programming

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 04:48:29 +0000

I love computing; I enjoy building systems, as well as just programming for programming’s sake. (The Joy of Computing!)

News Catalyst

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 04:00:59 +0000

In the fall of 2019, I worked at News Catalyst, building digital tools to empower local news organizations. My work at News Catalyst was supported by the Lenfest Institute.

First Look Media

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 04:36:44 +0000

In the summer of 2018, I worked on the engineering and research teams of First Look Media, the parent company of The Intercept, primarily on authoring an IETF Internet Draft.

Open source development

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:31:00 +0000

Most of the software I write is open source. In maintaining and contributing to these projects, I’ve learned about effective community building, communication, and documentation.

More research

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 02:26:28 +0000

You can see an overview of my research on my Google Scholar page.

Platforms’ content moderation decisions play a large role in mediating online discourse, especially during elections. What content did platforms label as misleading in the run up to the 2020 election? And were platforms consistent in their labeling decisions? In this paper, we leverage a unique dataset to answer these questions.

a17t

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 21:49:53 +0000

a17t is my lightweight open-source atomic design toolkit. It emphasizes customization, modularity, and separation of concerns (to the extent that is practical).

Politiwatch

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 03:44:30 +0000

Politiwatch is a nonprofit I founded in high school that uses technology to promote political accountability and digital rights.

More projects

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 21:50:06 +0000

A selection of older projects:

WhyPrivacyMatters.org — a collaborative project to argue for privacy; translated into 16 languages with over 30 contributors
OpenAlerts — an open source breaking news distribution system for newsrooms (with News Catalyst)
Politiwatch Disinformation Archive — a searchable index of the official Twitter disinformation archives