Jon A. Chun

Teaching

I apply industry best practices and state-of-the-art AI and machine learning techniques to high-impact interdisciplinary research, and teach them the same way. Our paper The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence, published in the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, outlines the challenges and opportunities AI presents to higher education, along with the theory, structure and goals of our human-centered approach.

Education and curriculum

Our human-centered curriculum is collaborative at multiple levels and interdisciplinary while maintaining academic rigor. Students from virtually every department across campus create a learning and research environment you do not find in a conventional computer science sequence. The point is not general AI literacy: students learn enough programming, machine learning, generative AI and evaluation to conduct original technical research while bringing their own disciplinary expertise into model design, evaluation and interpretation. Courses begin with disciplinary questions in literature, history and philosophy, then teach programming, natural language processing, machine learning and AI governance as investigative tools. Students progress from questions to technical work to interpretation and, often, to publication.

Research from the AI CoLab has contributed to collaborative projects with institutions including Oxford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Business School. We focus on productive collaborations that operationalize solutions to the big questions central to the liberal arts experience, including partnerships with industry leaders such as Meta and IBM, government agencies including the NIST AI Safety Institute, and non-profits including the AI Alliance, the MLA, the US Chamber of Commerce and The Helix Center.

A classroom blackboard densely covered with diagrams and notes from a Fall 2022 class session
A blackboard from a Fall 2022 class session.

Courses

Courses designed and taught in Kenyon College's Integrated Program in Humane Studies
Course Title Introduced
IPHS 200 Programming Humanity. Foundational programming and data analysis, and the entry point for students who are not computer science majors. Fall 2017
IPHS 290 Cultural Analytics. Fall 2022
IPHS 300 AI for the Humanities. Machine learning and AI concepts building on the foundational programming course. 2019
IPHS 391 Frontiers in Generative AI: Autonomous Agent Networks. Agentic AI and multi-agent systems. Approved 2023, first taught Fall 2024. Fall 2024
IPHS 484 Senior Seminar and Research. The capstone research project. 2018
Custom Industrial IoT Predictive Maintenance. An industry collaboration on end-to-end time series prediction. 2021

Course repositories

Full course material for Frontiers in Generative AI is public on GitHub:

Student projects

Undergraduate research published on Digital Kenyon. These are a sample; the full collections are linked at the end of this section.

Projects using SentimentArcs

Projects from Frontiers in Generative AI, Fall 2024

Full collections: IPHS 200 · IPHS 300 · IPHS 391 · IPHS 484

Impact and access

Program metrics. Reach figures are from Digital Kenyon; enrollment demographics are from Kenyon College Institutional Research.
Metric Value
Research downloads 130,000 or more (130,316 as of September 15, 2026)
Institutions reached 4,700 or more, in 198 countries
Top visiting institutions Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge
Published undergraduate projects 190 or more on Digital Kenyon
Projects mentored 300 or more since 2017
Female enrollment 61 percent, up from 18 percent in 2017
Students not majoring in STEM More than 90 percent
Black students 13 percent
Latine students 11 percent
Drop rate and pass rate 0 percent and 100 percent
Enrollment growth 20 to 120 students, 2017 to 2022
Chart showing gender enrollment in the AI and digital humanities courses rising from 18 percent female in 2017 to 61 percent by Spring 2022
Progress on gender diversity since 2017, reaching 61 percent female enrollment as of Spring 2022.
Chart showing that more than 90 percent of students enrolled are not STEM majors
More than 90 percent of enrolled students are not STEM majors. Source: Kenyon College Institutional Research.

Program timeline