About

Biography

I am a research scientist and AI leader specializing in interdisciplinary machine learning and AI applications across high-impact domains. Over the past decade I have mentored more than 300 original AI and machine learning projects spanning nearly every academic discipline, from narrative and medicine to security and political science, with work downloaded more than 130,000 times by institutions including Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Oxford, Amazon and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

I currently serve as co-PI for the Modern Language Association team, representing 25,000 members, in the NIST AI consortium, working on red team and blue team testing of large language models. I am also co-PI and chief AI architect for one of 23 teams worldwide awarded a Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute grant. Our interdisciplinary team from Columbia University, Berklee College of Music and Louisiana State University is building a multilingual and multimodal archival digitization, restoration and integrated graph database system for early 1900s New Orleans jazz collections. Previously I led research into tabular LLM recidivism prediction benchmarking for Notre Dame's Tech Ethics Lab on an IBM grant, using multi-agent debate simulations of US bench trials. Several papers are under review at top-tier 2026 venues including ICML, FAccT, the Journal of Cyber Policy and JAIR. My research focuses on AI safety and security, AI auditing and benchmarking, machine psychology and theory of mind, affective AI, multi-agent workflow automation, and international AI policy and regulation.

Technical expertise spans LLM development and auditing, multimodal AI, automated agent frameworks, game theory simulations, and applying state-of-the-art research to real-world problems in finance, healthcare, law and narrative. I build AI systems for contexts where context, users, adversaries and expert judgment matter as much as raw model capability, which means real-world user testing, failure condition analysis, domain expertise embedded in the architecture rather than bolted on as external review, visible uncertainty instead of fluent but decontextualized answers, and evaluation designed in from the start. I co-founded the world's first human-centered AI program bridging academia, research and industry best practices.

My background includes Fortune 500 director roles, co-founding and leading a Silicon Valley startup as CEO, and international experience across the United States, Japan and Latin America. I hold two US patents on network security, and my published research spans gene therapy to AI policy.

Education and languages

• M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin
• B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley

Languages: English (native), Spanish (US Foreign Service Exam certified), Japanese (JLPT certified), French (professional working proficiency).

Career summary

Key highlights

• SafeWeb, co-founder and CEO

  Built the world's largest online privacy service, handling two billion transactions in eight months. Secured 11 million dollars from Wall Street funds plus the first security investment ever made by In-Q-Tel, the CIA-affiliated non-profit. Pivoted to enterprise SSL VPN and drove a 26 million dollar acquisition by Symantec at 35 times revenue. (Product archive)

• Symantec, Director of Development

  Launched the Clientless VPN Gateway in a single quarter, under budget, with two thirds of the planned team. A 400,000 line release shipped with zero attrition through the acquisition integration.

• Matrix Absence Management, Director of IT

  Architected business-to-business systems for more than 200 high-technology clients including Intel, Dell and Cisco. Led a 25 million dollar Unisys due diligence.

• Latin eVentures, CTO

  Delivered a multi-million dollar business-to-business portal and ERP system across Latin America in three languages, and saved 500,000 dollars in vendor renegotiations.

Patents

1. Chun, Jon A., Stephen Dao Hui Hsu and James Noshir Hormuzdiar; Symantec Corporation. "Intelligent Secure Data Manipulation Apparatus and Method." US Patent 7,730,528 B2. (Patent documents)
2. Stephen Dao Hui Hsu, James Noshir Hormuzdiar and Jon A. Chun; Symantec Corporation. "Method and Apparatus for Encrypted Communications to a Secure Server." US Patent 8,065,520.

Honors

• Tau Beta Pi, engineering honor society, UC Berkeley
• Eta Kappa Nu, electrical and computer engineering honor society, UC Berkeley
• American Heart Association Research Fellow, University of Iowa College of Medicine, with two PubMed-indexed publications

Organizations

US NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium

Lead AI Safety Researcher, 2024 to present, for the Modern Language Association and its 25,000 members worldwide.

From the MLA announcement: the MLA is joining more than 200 of the nation's leading AI stakeholders in a US Department of Commerce initiative for trustworthy and safe AI. The MLA-sponsored team, led by Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun at Kenyon College, evaluates model capabilities with a special focus on linguistic edge cases and ethical frameworks.

Human Centered AI Lab

Founder, January 2024 to present.

A volunteer, wholly virtual non-profit that facilitates interdisciplinary AI collaboration between researchers and domain experts on safety, bias, explainability, ethics and policy.

The Helix Center, New York

Executive Board Member, November 2022 to present.

Interdisciplinary roundtables drawing together leaders from the arts, humanities, sciences and technology, including Living in Difficult Times in November 2022.

Kenyon AI CoLab

• Interdisciplinary AI and machine learning projects
• Kenyon Digital CoLab
• Kenyon Interdisciplinary Human-Centered AI Program

Collaborations

Government and policy

• US White House AI safety policy and the NIST AI Safety Institute, with NIST and the MLA
• Comparative global AI regulation, with SSRN, arXiv and the Journal of Cyber Policy

Industry and research

• Meta Global Scholars Research Group
• AI Alliance Essential AI Competencies Guide, with Meta, IBM, Intel and the US Chamber of Commerce
• BWG Strategy, technology strategy and AI investing, New York
• IBM and Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab

Academic

• Collaborative AI safety and open-source policy, with Oxford, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and Berklee and MIT
• AI and the future of higher education, with Notre Dame, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School
• Computational law, ethics and explainable AI, with the ACM, Northwestern Law, IBM and Notre Dame
• Multimodal affective AI, with Meta, the NEH and EMNLP/CoNLL
• Narrative and affective AI, with Yale, Harvard and the Narrative conferences
• NLP and AI research, with ICML, ACL, the ACM, AAAI and FAccT
• Theoretical computer science, with McGill, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon
• Psychology and cognitive science, with Ohio State University
• Literature, language and linguistics, with the MLA and Cambridge University Press
• Theatre and film, with Denison, the NEH and LA Theatre

Other domains

• Medicine and the FDA, with AFDO and RAPS
• Physics and engineering simulations, with NAFEMS
• IoT predictive maintenance, with the Kenyon AI CoLab and Weyerhaeuser Paper
• Computer and network security, with the USPTO and Symantec
• Electronic medical records, with the University of Iowa and the American Medical Informatics Association
• Financial information systems, with Bloomberg and McGraw-Hill Tokyo
• Semiconductor research, with SEMATECH and Lawrence Berkeley Labs

Press

AI and the humanities, 2023 to 2026

• Where AI Meets the Humanities: Inside Kenyon College's Bold Experiment

  Forbes, November 2025

• AI's potential to help preserve endangered archives

  NPR and the Ohio Newsroom, February 2026, syndicated by Library Journal infoDOCKET

• AI safety and the NIST consortium

  Christian Science Monitor, February 2026

• Faculty receive a major award for AI work advancing the humanities

  Kenyon College, December 2025, on the Schmidt Sciences HAVI grant

• Debate on AI and art

  Al Jazeera, The Stream, 2023

• Invited speaker, virtual forum

  Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2025

SafeWeb and internet privacy

• CIA web masking technology and the In-Q-Tel license

  Wall Street Journal

• US support for evading Chinese internet censorship

  New York Times

• Spy Tech

  Washington Post feature

• International coverage of the SafeWeb technology

  Le Monde

• Analysis in the You've Got Dissent! monograph

  RAND Corporation

• Symantec's 26 million dollar SafeWeb acquisition

  CRN, Network World and The Register

Writing

Selected essays and public thinking, published on LinkedIn.

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