I was honored to serve as a judge at Stanford this week for the final projects in CS 152: Trust and Safety Engineering, a pioneering course led by Alex Stamos.

Thirty industry judges supported the work of 120 students, who presented thoughtful systems using large language models to address issues such as sextortion, suicide, investment scams (also known as “pig butchering”), and political misinformation. Students were asked to design holistic solutions that went beyond traditional CS coding assignments. Many interviewed victims, created test cases to identify false positives and false negatives, and mapped out support workflows, including scenarios where strong intervention was necessary.

I was excited to learn that this class is now being taught at several other institutions. Beyond the growing interest in trust and safety, courses like this help shape a generation of engineers who go beyond building just functional computer applications: they are building responsible technology that reflect the human impact behind every line of code.