With 2025 coming to an end, the Applied Social Media Lab (ASML) rounded out the year with its second Synthesizer & Open Showcase, inviting students, researchers, and industry professionals to the Berkman Klein Center to learn more about ASML’s ongoing work and share their own public interest tech projects with the community.
The afternoon kicked off with a discussion between ASML Senior Director Meg Marco and journalist Emily White-Baker, who shared insights from her new book, Every Screen on the Planet: The Secret Story of TikTok. The conversation explored how power over speech, data, and visibility is concentrated in a small number of platforms and people. Emily shared her first-hand accounts with online harms, and explored how addressing these harms requires not only better tools, but new models of accountability, governance, and transparency. Additionally, a safer, more democratic internet won’t emerge by accident. Instead, the most meaningful progress happens when engineers, researchers, journalists, and policy experts work together and combine technical innovation with legal, social, and ethical insight.
Senior Engineer Jen Hickey then shared the public launch of NextSpace, a suite of tools aimed at making events more accessible and improving the overall audience experience by offering customized information. NextSpace ran during Emily and Meg’s talk, and the team showcased in real time many of the key features, including pseudonymous audience participation, an Event Assistant that answers questions and provides real-time recaps, and a moderator-facing Backchannel that aggregates audience questions and interests to help facilitators adapt conversations in real time. By open-sourcing NextSpace and the underlying LLM Engine, ASML is creating a modular foundation that others can adapt across platforms (Zoom, Slack, web) and use cases to advance research, evaluation, and responsible deployment of conversational AI. Read more about the NextSpace project here.
The presentations were followed by ASML’s Open Showcase, which gave in-person attendees the opportunity to speak to the Lab’s engineers about specific ongoing projects. The showcase also welcomed over a dozen external academics and industry professionals to share their own projects around public interest tech, with a special interest in civil discourse and privacy.
Watch both presentations below.