Authenticity-by-Design: The Capture, Store, Verify Seminar Series

Join Us Oct 31, Nov 7, and Dec 5

Authenticity-by-Design: The Capture, Store, Verify Fall Seminar Series

Starling Lab will be hosting a three-part series from 12:00-1:00 pm PST on Oct 31, Nov 7, and Dec 5 about how new approaches using the Starling Framework of Capture/Store/Verify can better guarantee authenticity, availability, and persistence of digital media – as well as the challenges and design decisions involved with new approaches. These talks and panels will be held on-campus at Stanford as well as online live via Zoom.

Register for the Authenticity by Design Seminar series:

We will address these issues with collaborators from our co-founders, Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering and the USC Shoah Foundation. Our contributors include practitioners in distributed technology and cryptography, as well as members of the digital archiving, humanitarian, and journalism spaces. 

This series will be an opportunity to talk about using advances in cryptography, peer-to-peer technologies, and decentralized storage in database implementation and practices. We will be focusing on new patterns and designs for collections of data that are distributed, and provide capabilities beyond the single-owner, centralized databases that are widely used today, as well as the real world applications and needs for these types of innovations.

Part 1 (Oct 31) - Capture: New Tools To Establish Trust 

This will be a 60-minute talk followed by a Q&A session.

Speakers

Ann Grimes is the Director of Journalism Fellowships at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity. Ann is a veteran journalist. She has held senior editorial positions and worked with several notable universities and institutions in different capacities.

Adam Rose is the COO for the Starling Lab for Data Integrity who has spent two decades in journalism with a focus on digital media and video production. 

Summary

Humanity is producing more content than at any point in history. Generative AI is poised to accelerate that trend. Our collective stream of information is surging, but all too often it's filled with misinformation. As audiences and fact checkers confront these muddied waters downstream, can we find solutions upstream? 

This first talk will provide an overview of what we do at Starling Lab for Data Integrity, and focus on the problems we are researching, and solutions we are prototyping. It will then explore case studies of how we capture digital assets in the field with a root of trust.

Starling Lab tests innovative ways to authenticate digital records at their origin, establishing the time, date and location of their creation, and creating tools for consumers to view information and draw conclusions about authenticity. These methods can be used to bolster trust in journalism, critical records, archives, and are even finding their way into legal systems.

Part 2 (Nov 7) - Store: Authenticated Databases

This event will be a 60 minute panel hosted during Stanford University’s Democracy Day, facilitated by Kate Sills featuring representatives from Ceramic, Fission, Hypha, and Fireproof Storage . There will be a short presentation followed by a panel discussion with engineers who are building the technology and protocols for data collections and authenticated databases.

Panelists

Kate Sills is a software engineer and consultant specializing in applied cryptography who has worked as a lead engineer of Agoric’s smart contract framework, as well as on a committee for the Centre for Computational Law in Singapore.

Mark Krasner works as a partner engineer at 3Box Labs, who supports collaborators and builders using the Ceramic Network as their decentralized data storage solution, such as ComposeDB.

J. Chris Anderson is the founder of Fireproof Storage. He is a technical leader of many successful open-source, mobile, and multi-platform infrastructure teams, and has contributed to mission-critical systems, who is currently working on distributed databases and self-sovereign identity.

Quinn Wilton is an applied researcher at Fission, where she spends her time at the intersection of programming language theory and distributed systems. She has developed Rhizome DB which is a database for use in building local-first applications over a content addressable data.

Summary

In this session, Kate Sills will present the research she is doing on a tool called Authenticated Attributes, which aims to add provenance and authenticity metadata to digital media. The goal of this work is to make it impossible to backdate original data, fake sources, and tamper with claims made about digital content. 

The panel and presentation will touch concepts and research in areas such as cryptographic hashes, timestamping (anchoring) services, data composability, using hashes as identifiers, digital signatures, key-value stores, the entity-attribute-value model, subjective reconciliation, peer-to-peer replication, and more. 

We will be talking with different engineers about their solutions for collecting and sharing data, and discuss characteristics and design considerations for these different types of data collections such as:

• Trustworthiness: Data that is Auditable, Verifiable, and Provable

• Structure: Content-Referenced and Decentralized

• Portability: Enable Peer-to-Peer Replication and Sharing

Part 3 (Dec 5) - Verify: Applications for Authenticated Databases 

Note new date is Dec 5 (was previously Nov. 30).

This 60 minute event will consist of a short presentation followed by a panel discussion facilitated by Lindsay Walker, Product Lead at Starling Lab. This session will invite practitioners of archiving and collaborative investigations to have a discussion about the potential of authenticated data collections, provenance tools, and verifiable databases.

Panelists

Lindsay Walker is the Product Lead for the Starling Lab for Data Integrity who has a background in education, technical training, and product and program management. Her current work encompasses executing and implementing authentication prototypes.

Jake Nicol is an Emmy-nominated multimedia freelance journalist and 2023 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. He teaches digital journalism and video storytelling at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. 

Dr. Aaron Arnold is a Senior Associate Fellow with the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at RUSI, where his work focuses on sanctions and proliferation financing.

Niko Para is a software engineer in the Human Rights Sector.  He is a Senior Technical Consultant at Security Force Monitor, a project of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University.  For over a decade he has been working with nonprofits to create applications, interactive stories,  databases and archives. 

Noah Schechter is an undergraduate at Stanford studying international relations and computer science. He leads product and operations at Atlos, a non-profit and open source collaborative workspace for large-scale visual verification projects. He also works on the product team at Meedan, the fact-checking tool.

Summary

In this session Lindsay will tie the work on authenticated databases to the work that Starling Lab has done across the domains of journalism, law and history to establish trust in our most sensitive digital records.

We have invited practitioners of archiving and collaborative investigations to have a discussion about the potential of different technology, designs, and solutions aimed to preserve the authenticity and integrity of data. The panelists are all practitioners in digital capture and preservation, and work on projects that involve collaborations usings sets of media and metadata.

In this panel, we will talk about:

• Collaborative, open-source investigations between multiple journalists, archivist, and investigators on a common set of events or claims

• Archivists and historians who have custody of multi-generational archives

• Leading technologists and product designers, representing the community of human rights defenders and monitors

• The curation of databases for various accountability and advocacy purposes

The goal of this panel is to help developers and attendees gain an understanding of the technological needs of archivists, historians, legal scholars, and journalists. These discussions aim to foster opportunities for collaborations between those creating the technology and those who have a need for it.