Project

The centerpiece of this class is a group project in which your team of 4-5 students will take on the role of a Trust and Safety team at a corporate AI or social media company. Your group will pick a real safety problem on a real platform, study it, speak to victims (if possible), design a mitigation to the issue, implement it, test it, and then present your solution to real professionals at our final poster session on June 2nd.

Topics from previous years have included:

• Online cryptocurrency scams
• AI nudifiers and deepfakes
• AI chatbots being inappropriate with children
• Live streaming of terrorist attacks
• Government propaganda against domestic minorities
• Disinformation in online ads
• Coordinated harassment of journalists
• Sextortion
• Trading of child sexual abuse materials
• Hate speech on a streaming platform
• Terrorist recruitment

This is a good example of a final poster from a previous year.

This year, students will be allowed to pick their teammates, as long as there is an attempt to balance between the CS and non-CS listings of the class (we will know the final team size and ratio after the add/drop deadline). Groups will be finalized the week of April 20th. This year, we are also adding more structure to the software engineering components, as the goal is to simulate the workings of a real tech company. You will be setting up a CI/CD pipeline, creating a PRD, using pull requests and reviews, filing tickets, and using AI tooling like a real startup. Working software engineers (several of whom are alumni of this course!) will run evening Zoom sessions to assist in this setup and provide mentorship as needed.

The group project has three graded milestones. The first milestone assignment is to be completed individually and will be posted during the first week of class. In milestone 1, you will pick an individual area of interest, research it, create a presentation and record a five minute video as to why this would be an interesting topic for the group to tackle.

The second milestone will be focused on the group’s analysis of the safety issue, setting up of their infrastructure and requirements documentation. The final milestone will be the working solution, which will be presented to a group of around thirty working security and safety professionals from industry at an open poster session, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, June 2nd 5-7pm.

In previous years, our guest judges have come from:

• Google
• Meta
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• TikTok
• Discord
• Match Group
• Uber
• Sony
• Microsoft
• xAI
• Adobe
• Apple
• Reddit
• Many startups and NGOs