AI Researcher · Schmidt Sciences HAVI · UC Berkeley · Kenyon College

Jon A. Chun

Research scientist and AI leader specializing in interdisciplinary ML/AI applications across high-impact domains. Over the past decade, Jon has mentored 400+ original AI/ML projects spanning nearly every academic discipline — from narrative and medicine to security and political science — with work downloaded 95,000+ times by institutions including Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Amazon, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Currently serving as tech lead for the 25,000-member MLA team in the NIST US AI Safety Institute for LLM evaluation and red-teaming, and co-PI for Schmidt Sciences HAVI (1 of 23 teams worldwide), building open-source AI tools to rescue endangered jazz archives in New Orleans. Prior industry: co-founded SafeWeb ($26M acquisition by Symantec; first In-Q-Tel security investment); two US patents.

NIST CAISI
Principal Investigator
Representing MLA · LLM evaluation & red-teaming
Schmidt Sciences
Co-PI & AI Architect
1 of 23 worldwide · Archival Intelligence
ICML 2024
Oral Presentation
Top 2% · Open-source generative AI
SafeWeb → Symantec
Co-Founder & CEO
$26M acquisition · First In-Q-Tel security investment

400+
Student research projects mentored in ML/AI since 2016
95,336
Downloads from 4,760 institutions across 198 countries
22
Papers published or under review at top-tier venues
2
US patents on network security (assigned to Symantec)

Current Research

Current focus

AI Safety & Evaluation: LLM red/blue team testing and ethical auditing for NIST CAISI. Auditing negation sensitivity, syntactic framing vulnerabilities, and robustness in high-stakes decision-making. Multi-agent simulation of judicial reasoning (AgenticSimLaw, with Notre Dame).

Archival Intelligence: Schmidt Sciences-funded project building multimodal AI tools to rescue endangered archives at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. OCR, audio restoration, cross-modal linking. Open-source, community-governed.

Technical stack: Full-stack ML from GPT-2 (2019) through current LLMs. Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, HuggingFace Transformers. Created SentimentArcs, an open-source ensemble for diachronic sentiment analysis adopted globally and the basis for The Shapes of Stories (Cambridge UP, 2022).

Selected Publications

Recent research

Computational Methods & Multi-Agent Systems
"AgenticSimLaw: A Juvenile Courtroom Multi-Agent Debate Simulation for Explainable High-Stakes Tabular Decision Making"
Accepted, LaMAS 2026 (with K. Elkins and Y. S. Lee, Notre Dame)
"Syntactic Framing Fragility: An Audit of Robustness in LLM Ethical Decisions"
arXiv, December 2025 (with K. Elkins)
"AIStorySimilarity: Quantifying Story Similarity Using Narrative"
ACL EMNLP/CoNLL, Miami, 2024
"MultiSentimentArcs: Affective AI and Multimodal Diachronic Sentiment Analysis"
Frontiers in Computer Science, 2024
"eXplainable AI with GPT4 for Story Analysis and Generation"
International Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 5, 2023 (with K. Elkins)
Governance, Security & AI Policy
"Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI"
Proceedings of ICML 2024 · Oral presentation (top 2%)
"If Open Source is to Win it Must Go Public"
Spotlight talk, CODEML, ICML 2025
"Informed AI Regulation: Comparing the Ethical Frameworks of Leading LLM Chatbots"
arXiv, 2024 (with K. Elkins)
"Comparative Global AI Regulation: EU, China, and the US"
arXiv, 2024 (with C. Schroeder de Witt & K. Elkins)
Interdisciplinary Methods
"Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?"
Journal of Cultural Analytics 5(2), 2020 (with K. Elkins) · 362+ citations
"What the Rise of AI Means for Narrative Studies"
Narrative 30(1), 2022 (with K. Elkins)
"The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: A New DH Curriculum for Human-Centered AI"
Int. J. Humanity and Arts Computing 17, 2023

10 additional papers under review at ICML, FAccT, UAI, CogSci, TMLR, DMLR, and Journal of Cyber Policy (2026). GitHub →


Before Kenyon

Industry & startups

SafeWeb, Inc.
Co-Founder, President & CEO
Built world's largest online privacy service (2B transactions in 8 months). $11M VC; first security investment from In-Q-Tel (CIA venture fund). Sold to Symantec for $26M at 35× trailing revenue.
Symantec Corp.
Director, Development
Post-acquisition integration. Launched Clientless VPN Gateway in one quarter, under budget. Zero attrition.
BWG Strategy LLC
AI Expert & Industry Analyst
Featured speaker on OpenAI/Microsoft, open-source regulation, Google Gemini, IBM Watson. Current.
US Patents
Network Security
US Patent 7,730,528 B2 — Intelligent Secure Data Manipulation. US Patent 8,065,520 — Encrypted Communications to Secure Server. Both assigned to Symantec.

Earlier: UC Berkeley COE Entrepreneur in Residence · Startup advisor at Berkeley Engineering and OSU · Latin eVentures CTO (São Paulo, $8M raised) · Lawrence Berkeley Labs · SEMATECH · MMS Int'l / McGraw-Hill Tokyo. Languages: Japanese (JLPT), Spanish (US Foreign Service), French.


Education & Training

Foundations

UC Berkeley
B.S., EECS
Honors · Tau Beta Pi · Eta Kappa Nu
UT Austin
M.S., EECS / Biomedical Engineering
Highest Honors · Focus: Cognitive Science
University of Iowa College of Medicine
AHA Research Fellow
Published research on gene therapy and EHR systems
MIT Japan Program
Advanced Technical Japanese
NSF / US Navy Scholarship

Get in Touch

Let's connect

jonchun@outlook.com