Jon A. Chun
Jon Chun helps build applied humane studies: using AI to ask the oldest human questions — what it means to be human, what a good life and a good society are — and connecting the people who can answer them, across the divide between the sciences and the humanities and across academia, industry, and government.
He is principal investigator for the 25,000-member Modern Language Association at NIST CAISI (LLM evaluation and red-teaming) and co-PI on Schmidt Sciences HAVI, building open-source AI to rescue endangered cultural archives. He co-founded Kenyon's AI CoLab and its human-centered AI curriculum, and earlier co-founded and led SafeWeb.
Three arcs, one practice
SafeWeb and the early security industry; the nonprofit Human-Centered AI Lab; convening collaborations that cross sectors.
LLM evaluation and red-teaming, comparative global AI regulation, and computational narrative — published at ICML and across the humanities.
Co-founder of the world's first interdisciplinary humane-studies program operationalizing the liberal arts with ML/AI, continuous since 2016.
Connecting the people who build the future
The work runs across silos that rarely talk to each other — frontier AI labs, industry analysts and investors, government standards bodies, multilateral institutions, and nonprofits.
OpenAI higher-education forums; Meta Open Innovation AI Research Community; the Notre Dame–IBM Tech Ethics Lab.
Multi-year participation (since 2023) in live BWG forums across the AI-market agenda with analysts, integrators, investors, and operators.
PI for the MLA at the NIST Center for AI Standards and Innovation; engagement with UNESCO and the UN on AI governance.
Interdisciplinary roundtables; co-founder of the nonprofit Human-Centered AI Lab.
What we built first
- Co-founded the world's first interdisciplinary humane-studies program and AI CoLab operationalizing the liberal arts with ML/AI (2016, continuous since).
- Created one of the first interdisciplinary, project-based agentic-AI courses — original student research on the big issues of the day, open to every division of the liberal arts (IPHS 391; approved 2023, first taught Fall 2024).
- Co-invented one of the first SSL / clientless VPN appliances at SafeWeb (two US patents).
- Among the first to empirically evaluate GPT-3 for creative writing (2020), months after the model's release.
- ICML 2024 oral presentation (top 2% of submissions) on open-source generative-AI risk and opportunity.
- Co-PI on Archival Intelligence, one of 23 Schmidt Sciences HAVI teams selected worldwide.
Archival Intelligence
Co-PI on Archival Intelligence, building free, open AI tools to rescue New Orleans' endangered Creole and Cajun multilingual newspapers and early jazz artifacts from smartphone photography — and to confront "cultural flattening" in AI models.
1 of 23 teams selected worldwide for the inaugural Humanities and AI Virtual Institute ($11M program; award up to $330K) — a highly selective global competition, among the top few percent of applicants. The cohort's peers include Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. Kenyon's AI CoLab is one of very few teams led from a small liberal-arts college, in a cohort otherwise dominated by major research universities.
Work that others build on
"Debating the system of values we wish these tools to align with is the first step."
Tanya Klowden & Terence Tao (Fields Medalist), engaging Chun & Elkins, IJHAC (2023)"The human-centered AI curriculum at Kenyon encompassed the true essence of a liberal arts education: using a wide range of academic disciplines to discuss world-changing contemporary issues."
Raul Romero, Kenyon College Class of 2022- Forbes
- NPR
- Christian Science Monitor
- Al Jazeera
- Chronicle of Higher Education
Common questions
What is applied humane studies?
It takes the oldest human questions — what it means to be human, what a good life and a good society are — and operationalizes them with AI: building, measuring, and testing, not only critiquing. Jon Chun co-founded the field with Katherine Elkins at Kenyon's AI CoLab in 2016.
What does Jon Chun do now?
He is principal investigator for the Modern Language Association at NIST CAISI (LLM evaluation and red-teaming) and co-PI on Schmidt Sciences HAVI (Archival Intelligence), one of 23 teams selected worldwide.
What was SafeWeb?
An internet privacy company Jon co-founded in 2000 and later led as CEO. It received the first security investment from In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investment firm affiliated with the CIA, and was acquired by Symantec in 2003 for $26 million.