Courses
Educational opportunities for students and professionals with the support of two research universities
Academics & Research
"Authenticity by Design" (EE292J)
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2024
2025
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Spring Quarter 2026
Guest Lecture: The Ticks Report
Sam Gregory, WITNESS
Guest Lecture: It’s All About Provenance
Santiago Lyon, Adobe Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI)
Guest Lecture: How Authenticity Impacts Legal Accountability
Beth Van Schaack, former United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, US State Department
An interdisciplinary course at Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering, co-taught by Starling Lab instructors Jonathan Dotan and Ann Grimes. The class equips students with a new framework to understand, deploy, and design systems that restore trust in digital content. It explores how recent advances in cryptography and the decentralized web can be practically applied to prove the authenticity of information, moving beyond simple detection to build a new architecture for trusted data.
The course evolved from a 1-unit seminar in Spring 2024 to a full 3-unit class in Spring 2025, reflecting growing student interest. It emphasizes practical application and real-world perspectives by featuring numerous guest speakers from the Starling Lab team and leading external organizations. Experts from fields like human rights, journalism, and software development provide students with direct insights into the challenges and solutions being implemented to protect digital records.
Training
The Archive Accelerator
A free, multi-day workshop series for community archivists. It serves as an onramp to Web3 systems, focusing on decentralized digital storage and cryptography for preservation.
The lab ran three cohorts across 2022 and 2023. The March 2023 cohort included over 30 participants from more than 20 organizations.
Starling Journalism Trainings
Coming SoonWhat modern digital tools can you use to prove your work is authentic? Starling Lab helps people answer this question and establish trust in their digital records. This is different from arbitrating what’s “true” or “false,” but instead empowers journalists and their audiences to make their own evaluations about digital media. We’re a nonprofit academic research lab (co-founded by Stanford and USC) and we prioritize free and open source solutions.
Seminars & Workshops
Authenticity By Design Seminar Series
SeminarThis 3-part seminar, held at Stanford, explored how we can design new tools and systems to restore trust in digital content, as well as advances in applied cryptography and decentralized storage in database implementation.
Curriculum and speakers list available on Substack.
Journalism-focused trainings
MiscThomson Foundation Workshop (2024): The lab (specifically Adam Rose) presented in an online workshop for international journalists titled “Rethinking disinformation: psychology, prebunking and other tactics to halt the spread”
Authenticity Toolkit Workshop (October 2023): A workshop created for the Filecoin Orbit meetup in Austin, TX, which introduced the lab’s methodologies and prototypes.
Kalish Institute Webinar (March 2023): The lab organized a panel with its 2022 journalism fellows titled “Authentication of Digital Visual Content in the Age of Misinformation”.
TechSoup Presentation (February 2025): Adam Rose led a presentation for TechSoup on “Decentralized Storage for High-Censorship Environments”.
Law-focused trainings
MiscWeb Archiving & Accountability Workshops (Fall 2022): The lab convened a two-part series focused on web archiving for accountability in Ukraine – resulting in the “Best Practices for Web Archiving” white paper.
- Technical Workshop (August 25, 2022): A session for web archiving experts to discuss best practices and preservation strategies.
- Legal Roundtable (September 27, 2022): A session for legal experts to discuss the legal dimensions and admissibility of web archiving practices.
Gen AI & Evidence Roundtable (July 2025): A one-day event in The Hague, co-hosted with Fenix Foundation, to discuss and co-author guidelines regarding digital evidence in the age of Generative AI. This was a follow-up to a similar event in Washington D.C.
Expert Witness Training (Summer 2025): Basile Simon participated in legal advocacy training at the Inner Temple in London, serving as an expert witness on provenance and OSINT.
SHTEM: Summer Internships for High Schoolers and Community College Students
InternshipIn the Summer of 2022, Starling Lab participated in the STEM to SHTEM (Science, Humanities, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) summer program hosted by Prof. Tsachy Weissman and the Stanford Compression Forum. During the program, 65 high schoolers pursued fun research projects in various domains under the supervision of 13 mentors including several from the lab.