Fordham Law School will host the Trust & Safety Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge on Monday, May 13, and Tuesday, May 14. This is believed to be one of the first competitions of its kind held anywhere in the world.
Graduate school students and undergraduates from 10 schools—including Columbia University, Air University, Duke University, Middlebury Institute for International Studies, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, University of Toronto, Stanford University, University of Colorado Boulder, Princeton University, George Washington University, and Cornell University—will compete in an extended simulation, during which competitors will decide how to respond to an evolving situation on the ground implicating online trust and safety.
Fordham Law Professor Chinmayi Sharma is coordinating the competition. The event is co-sponsored by the Atlantic Council, which hosts cybersecurity contests around the world. Other sponsors include the Hewlett Foundation and Fordham Law.
Teams will be judged on their oral and written advocacy skills and will be evaluated by experts in the field of trust and safety, including attorneys from Fried Frank, the director of public policy at Microsoft, and the director of trust and safety at Spotify, all of whom are volunteering their time. Associate dean for academic affairs and incoming dean Joe Landau will introduce the event’s keynote speaker, Michael Masnick, the co-founder of the TechDirt blog and founder of Floor64.
Sharma said the topic of trust and safety is a leading issue in the tech community. “We are still figuring out today the unintentional consequences of software design,” Sharma said. “We want to get ahead of the problem and detect new risks before they cause harm.” She said she hopes student participants walk away with new information about the field of trust and safety, that they gain relevant knowledge and have an opportunity to network among professionals and students in the field.