By Wilson Chen, HCDE Master's student
I’ve been interested in academic research and the trust/safety space for a while, although I wasn’t able to get much research experience in my time in undergrad. As a Master’s student in the HCDE program, I was really eager to look into ways I could get more involved, and I found that place when I became part of Nina Lutz’s directed research group on US-Mexico border imagery. What came out of that was original work I made on image provenance, which was submitted and accepted for presentation at the Stanford Trust and Safety Research Conference. Attending my first research conference and presenting my work was an incredibly satisfying culmination of what I’ve been doing in the lab, and it’s made me so excited about what a future career in research might look like for me.
At the conference, I went out of my comfort zone and tried a lot of things — I networked with a lot of important people, attended panels outside my research scope to broaden my knowledge, got other people excited about my work, and explored California for the first time! There was an incredibly memorable panel from trust and safety directors and engineers working on Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon about the future of moderation in decentralized platforms. I heard incredibly moving talks from presenters at the Human Rights Watch and the Network Contagion Research Institute about how they cracked down on child abuse in difficult contexts with global adversaries. I’m definitely a lot more well-informed about the breadth of topics in the T&S space, and where the emerging problems in need of good solutions are. I’ll admit that it was overwhelming at times; I’m glad to have had several labmates with me on this trip to guide and ground me when I needed the support.
The whole experience in retrospective has given me a lot to think about. I’m graduating in a year. I’m thinking about careers in trust and safety spaces for industry and academia, and focusing my job hunt on work that can improve people’s relationships with technology. I’m a mission-driven person, and I’d like to work on something that can make a tangible difference.
Big thanks go to the HCDE Student Travel Fund and the GSTA for giving me the ability to attend this conference without financial stress.
Give to support HCDE student travel
The Mary B. Coney Endowed Fund, named in honor of Emeritus Professor Mary Coney, supports HCDE students by funding costs associated with travel to conferences and international workshops. Your support of this fund enriches the HCDE student experience and enhances HCDE's influence in the field.