About Me
Welcome to my website!
I currently work for a company called Wayflyer. We provide funding to eCommerce businesses which is a pretty exciting space these days. Wayflyer was the 6th Irish company to become a unicorn (worth more than $1B).
Previously I was a core member of the server teams for both Full Tilt and PokerStars. Some of the poker features I've worked on include:
Synchronized breaks which was an industry first at the time and is now an industry standard.
Automated tournament deals.
Draw poker games (2-7 triple draw, 5-card draw, Badugi).
Run it twice.
Tournament Tickets.
Irish poker, 5 card and 6 card Omaha, and Courchevel.
Multi-day tournaments.
“The Deal” mini game
Stars Rewards chests mechanics
My background is in computer science. I received my B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Alberta in 2004 and 2007 respectively. While there, I worked on several projects I am proud of. Some highlights are:
Working with the Computer Poker Research Group on the Polaris poker AI.
Wrote a thesis on evaluating skill of players playing Texas Hold'em called Postgame Analysis of Poker Decisions.
Helped solve 7x7 Hex, and contributed to a strong Hex playing AI.
Worked on the Trellis filesystem project.
In my spare time:
I'm an amateur photographer
I play poker recreationally from time to time
I enjoy reading a variety of books
I follow the tech industry pretty closely
I give video games and board games a fair amount of attention
Publications
Kevin Waugh, Martin Zinkevich, Michael Johanson, Morgan Kan, David Schnizlein, and Michael Bowling. A Practical Use of Imperfect Recall. Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA). 2009
Morgan Kan. Postgame Analysis of Poker Decisions. Master’s Thesis. 2007
Martin Zinkevich, Michael Bowling, Nolan Bard, Morgan Kan, Darse Billings. Optimal Unbiased Estimators for Evaluating Agent Performance. American Association of Artificial Intelligence National Conference (AAAI). pp 573-578. 2006
Paul Lu, Mike Closson, Cam Macdonell, Paul Nalos, Danny Ngo, Morgan Kan, and Mark Lee. The Trellis Security Infrastructure for Overlay Metacomputers and Bridged Distributed File Systems. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Vol. 66, No. 9, pp. 1181-1188, September 2006.
Darse Billings, Morgan Kan. A Tool for the Direct Assessment of Poker Decisions. International Computer Games Association Journal 29(3):119-142. 2006.
Darse Billings, Morgan Kan. Development of a Tool for the Direct Assessment of Poker Decisions. University of Alberta Tech Report. TR06-07. 2006.
Ryan Hayward, Yngvi Bjornsson, Michael Johanson, Morgan Kan, Nathan Po, Jack van Rijswijck. Solving 7×7 Hex with Domination, Fill-in, and Virtual Connections. Theoretical Computer Science. 349(2):123-129. 2005
Morgan Kan, Danny Ngo, Mark Lee, Paul Lu, Nolan Bard, Michael Closson, Meng Ding, Mark Goldenberg, Nicholas Lamb, Ron Senda, Edmund Sumbar, Yang Wang. The Trellis Security Infrastructure: A Layered Approach to Overlay Metacomputers. 18th International Symposium on High Performance Computing Systems and Applications (HPCS). pp 109-117. 2004
Ryan Hayward, Yngvi Bjornsson, Michael Johanson, Morgan Kan, Nathan Po, Jack van Rijswijck. Solving 7×7 Hex: Virtual Connections and Game-State Reduction. Advances in Computer Games: Many Games, Many Challenges. 10th Advances in Computer Games Conference. Van den Herik/Iida/Heinz editors. pp 261-278.