Jon A. Chun is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, AI researcher, and educator. He co-founded SafeWeb, Inc., which built the world's largest anonymous web proxy service (2 billion transactions in 8 months) and was one of the first portfolio investments by In-Q-Tel (CIA venture fund). SafeWeb was acquired by Symantec for $26M. At Symantec, he co-invented the first web-based (clientless) VPN appliance (2 US patents). Earlier, at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, he built one of the first web-based electronic patient record systems. He holds a B.S. in EECS (Honors) from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in EECS/Biomedical Engineering (Highest Honors) from UT Austin. In 2016, he and Katherine Elkins co-founded the world's first interdisciplinary Human-Centered AI curriculum and CoLab at Kenyon College, where he has mentored 400+ student AI/ML projects. He presented the first AI talks at the Narrative Conference (2020) and pioneered AI sessions at the MLA. He currently serves as Lead AI Safety Researcher and Tech Lead for the MLA's participation in the NIST US AI Safety Institute Consortium, representing 25,000+ scholars. In 2025, Kenyon was selected as 1 of 23 worldwide teams for the Schmidt Sciences HAVI grant ($330K) to develop AI tools for rescuing endangered archives. His research spans LLM auditing, AI safety, computational narrative, and affective AI, with 1,269+ Google Scholar citations and publications at ICML, ACL, FAccT, and Cultural Analytics.
- Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test? (2020) Paper
- SentimentArcs: A Novel Method for Self-Supervised Sentiment Analysis of Time Series Shows SOTA Transformers Can Struggle Finding Narrative Arcs (2021) Paper
- The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: A New Digital Humanities Curriculum for Human-Centred AI (2023) Paper
Roundtable Appearances
