Recognition
Research leadership, technical systems & recognition
Current AI research leadership, technical entrepreneurship, patents, scholarly recognition, and reception.
Current research leadership
- Schmidt Sciences HAVI, Co-Principal Investigator, “Archival Intelligence” (2025). Jon helps build computational workflows, evaluation methods, and open research infrastructure for difficult multilingual and historical data. The project was selected as 1 of 23 teams worldwide from 600+ applications, with up to $330,000 over 18 months from an $11M program. Archival Intelligence →
- Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab, co-PI (2024). Co-PI, with Katherine Elkins and Notre Dame's Yong Suk Lee, on a project auditing how large language models reason in high-stakes decisions under a FATE framework (fairness, accuracy, transparency, explainability), using recidivism prediction as a test case. A $60,000 grant (1 of 11 internationally), part of a round totaling more than $900,000.
- NIST CAISI (2024–present). Jon serves as Co-PI representing the Modern Language Association in the NIST CAISI consortium, working on LLM evaluation and red-teaming. The team's ethics-based audit results were presented during the opening keynote at the consortium's first plenary at the University of Maryland.
Technical entrepreneurship and systems
$26M
SafeWeb acquired by Symantec
In-Q-Tel
First security investment by the CIA-affiliated nonprofit
2
US patents on early SSL/clientless VPN appliances
- SafeWeb → Symantec. Co-founded SafeWeb and later served as CEO; the company received the first security investment by In-Q-Tel and was acquired by Symantec for $26 million (SEC Form 10-Q).
- US 7,730,528. “Intelligent secure data manipulation apparatus and method.” View patent →
- US 8,065,520. “Method and apparatus for encrypted communications to a secure server.” View patent →
Scholarly recognition and reception
- ICML 2024. Co-author of the open-source generative-AI position paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (oral). PMLR →
- Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu, engineering honor societies (UC Berkeley).
- American Heart Association Research Fellow, University of Iowa College of Medicine; two PubMed-indexed publications.
Scholarly reception
"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 fuller record traces how Jon’s independent and collaborative research has been adopted, replicated, extended, and used in new empirical settings.