Jon A Chun AI Digital Humanities
Co-Founder, Kenyon DH Colab
Contents (As of Jan 2023, see www.jonachun.com for a current information)
- Research
- Innovation in Higher Ed
- A Human-First AI Curriculum
- Code, Products and Patents
- Kenyon AI Digital Humanities
- Social Media
- Mentored Research
- Course Descriptions
- Organizations
Research
Jon Chun researches ML/AI approaches to NLP, Narrative and AffectiveAI with a particular focus on large language models, prompt engineering, and XAI/FATE. He also promotes and develops low/no code approaches for domain experts outside the AI community. He has been a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur/CEO as well as a Fortune 500 Director of Development for the world's largest security company. He has worked in a wide variety of fields including Medicine, Network Security and Finance in the US, Asia and Latin America.
Most recently, he created the open-source library SentimentArcs, the largest ensemble for diachronic sentiment analysis and the basis for Katherine Elkins's “The Shape of Stories” (Cambridge UP 2022). He presented some of the earliest GPT-2 story generation work at Narrative2020 and has since published in Cultural Analytics and Narrative on AI and Narrative. He has mentored approximately three hundred computational Digital Humanities projects over 6 years and across virtually every department at Kenyon College as part of the Integrated Program for Humane Studies and the Scientific Computing programs. He co-founded the AI Digital Humanities Colab and the world's first AI curriculum for the Liberal Arts at Kenyon. He is currently working on “Exploring the Black Box: Narrative XAI” for a special issue of The International Journal of Digital Humanities.
- Google Scholar: jonchun2000
- Academia.edu: kenyon.academia.edu/jchun
- Following: ArXiv CS.(x)
Recent Highlights
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(Upcoming) "Augmenting Narrative Generation with Visual Imagery Using Integrated Prompt Engineering (ChatGPT, DALL-E 2)", Narrative 2023, March 1-4th, Dallas, TX -Narrative Society
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(Upcoming) "Exploring the Black Box: Narrative XAI (eXplainable AI)", International Journal of Digital Humanities (IJDH) 2023 Special Issue on "Reproducibility and Explainability in Digital Humanities"
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Roundtable: "Generative AI Art and Writing: ChatGPT and Generative AI Art: How it Works, Where It's Going, and What It Means for Our Future" (video and links to generative AI resources), 17th January 2023, AI DHColab, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH
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Living In Difficult Times, The Helix Center, Nov 19th, 2022, NY, NY
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Chun, Jon, and Katherine Elkins. "What the Rise of AI Means for Narrative Studies: A Response to “Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature” by Angus Fletcher." Narrative 30, no. 1 (2022): 104-113. doi:10.1353/nar.2022.0005.
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Chun, Jon. "SentimentArcs: A Novel Method for Self-Supervised Sentiment Analysis of Time Series Shows SOTA Transformers Can Struggle Finding Narrative Arcs." ArXiv abs/2110.09454 (2021): n. page.
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Chun, Jon. AI Improv DivaBot in collaboration with Katherine Elkins, James Dennen (Denison University and Wexner Arts), Lauren Katz (Thymele Arts, LA), 100th anniversary of the premiere of “R.U.R.,” by Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek. “R.U.R.” (for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”) opened on January 25th, 1921, at the National Theater of Prague and marks the first use of the word “robot,” coined by Capek and derived from the Czech word for “forced labor.”, 25 Jan 2021
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Elkins, Katherine, and Jon Chun. "Can GPT-3 pass a Writer’s Turing Test?." Journal of Cultural Analytics 5, no. 2 (2020): 17212.
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(AI Story Generation / AI Narrative Generation) How Artificial Intelligence Tells Stories: Natural Language Generation and Narrative, Narrative 2020 Conference (page 28), March 5-7 The Intercontinental Hotel, New Orleans
The Shapes of Stories by Katherine Elkins
(Cambridge Press, Aug 2022)
Innovation in Higher Ed
I am focused on creatively applying the best of industry practices and state-of-the-art AI/ML techniques on interesting and high-impact interdisciplinary research. The combination of AI/ML, math/statistics and a diversity of domain expertise provides fresh insights and countless new paths of discovery.
I've also long been interested in bringing diverse voices to urgent debates surrounding technology’s growing impact on society. Our AI Digital Humanities computing curriculum has succeeded in attracting a majority female (61%), non-STEM (91%) and Under-Represented Minorities (11% Hispanic, 13% African-American) as of 2022. Enrollments have steadily grown to become one of the most popular courses on campus. Both our research and that of our students have seen exponential growth in terms of citations and thousands of visits from top academic institutions around the world.
Over most of the last decade, I have been developing a new humanity-first approach to teaching computation grounded in ML, AI and Data Science with real-world applications inseparable from ethics. One challenge was to bridge the STEM and non-STEM divide. Another challenge was harmonizing the rigorous specialization of academia with practical, cross-discipline and generalizable real-world solutions. The final challenge was to bootstrap an entirely new AI Digital Humanities computing curriculum without a budget, support staff, or academic credit toward any major/minor.
Over the first 6 years, our foundational course has become one of the most popular on campus. Both our professors' and students' research have been published in top journals, presented at leading conferences and have been read by thousands from top universities and research centers around the world. Both founders of our program have been involved in several organizations beyond Kenyon dedicated to AI, Ethics and innovating CS Education.
Philosophically, we believe humanity needs to shrink and reverse the growing gap between our technological advances that currently outpace and threaten to eclipse our humanity. One goal is to cultivate in students a technologically informed worldview grounded in universal humanistic values. This integrated worldview is designed to intimately align the core strengths of traditional education with more ethical, practical and beneficial uses of technology for all.
A Human-First AI Curriculum
Fall 2022 IPHS 200 Programming Humanity (estimate)
Category | Count | Percent |
---|---|---|
Male | 41 | 53% |
Female | 36 | 47% |
TOTAL | 78 | 100% |
- 13% African-American (10)
the 2017-2018 academic year
(61% female as of Spring 2022)
At Kenyon College, I co-founded the world’s first human-centric AI curriculum. I am the sole technical advisor and the primary collaborative content creator. Over the last six years of teaching this curriculum, we have achieved the following milestones:
• Research: Published research in top publications and conferences (Cambridge UP, Narrative, Journal of Cultural Analytics, etc.) with clear growth in citations.
• AI Digital Humanities/DH Colab Research: Organically grew (no marketing/PR) to ~15k hits from top universities worldwide (#4 CMU, #5 Berkeley, #6 Stanford, #7 Columbia, #9 NYU, #16 Princeton, #22 Oxford, #23 MIT, #25 Cambridge, etc.)
• Diversity:
- Female Grew from 18% to 61% between 2017-2021
- Hispanic participation rates are often at or above college averages
- African-American 13% (Fall 2022 estimate above)
- Non-STEM Our classes are ~90% non-STEM from across nearly all departments, enfranchising many students who may otherwise feel alienated by traditional CS programs
• Enrollment: Experienced enrollment growth from 20 to 120 between 2017-2022 becoming one of the largest classes at Kenyon as an elective with no credit toward the traditional STEM computing major/minor
• Budget: With no budget or antecedent, innovated from scratch a globally recognized computational DH Colab research center and AI Digital Humanities. This includes no funds for hardware, software, cloud computing, support staff or other common expenses. This is achieved thru continual strategic planning, careful curation and testing fully open-source, robust, best-of-breed and/or freely available resources informed by decades of experience in industry.
Our interdisciplinary AI DH research has been published in top presses, journals, and conferences. We have also mentored hundreds of ML/AI DH projects that synthesize Artificial Intelligence with literature, history, political science, art, dance, music, law, medicine, economics and more. Various sample AI DH projects are given at the bottom of this page.
Timeline
- 1992-99: The Integrated Program for Humane Studies (IPHS, the oldest interdisciplinary program at Kenyon) established a computer lab in Timberlake House for DH scholarship under Director Michael Brint
- 2002 Jul: Katherine Elkins joined Kenyon and began mentoring traditional Digital Humanities projects (e.g. critiques of technology, websites, media, etc.) in the IPHS program
- 2003 May: Launched product Symantec Clientless VPN appliance as Director of Development and relocated from Silicon Valley
- 2005 Mar: Proposed new humanity-centered AI Digital Humanities curriculum in conjunction with a multi-million Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant
- 2015 Aug: Formulated detailed interdisciplinary AI Digital Humanities curriculum after years of research and training
- 2017 Mar: Lead DH Kenyon Team at the HackOH5 Hackathon to explore challenges and opportunities in implementing computational Digital Humanities and effecting collaboration across disciplines
- 2017 Aug: Kenyon supports the first 'Programming Humanity' course co-taught with a Humanities and Comparative Literature professor.
- 2018 Aug: Kenyon adds first 'AI for the Humanities' course with a differentiated approach to GOFAI/ML through DNN, RL, and GA
- 2018 Aug: Katherine Elkins awarded a multi-year National Endowment of the Humanities Distinguished Professorship to continue developing a campus-wide Digital Humanities program to include every interested department
- 2022 Jan: Collaboration with Scientific Computing program at Kenyon mentoring several majors on interdisciplinary research
- 2022 Aug: Kenyon offers first computational 'Cultural Analytics' DH methodology course for Social Sciences and Humanities
- 2022 Aug: First collaboration with local industry via 'Industrial IoT Independent Study' targeting technical reference implementation and strategic whitepaper
![Trulli](images/kenyon_neh_history.jpg)
Kenyon College's
The National Endowment for the Humanities Professorship
Our AI research and DHColab were collaboratively developed and the curriculum is currently co-taught by a technology expert (Jon Chun) and an accomplished academic (Katherine Elkins). Both have broad experiences, publications, and interests transcending traditional domain boundaries. Support was provided with a 3-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) appointment described here.
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Collaborator Katherine Elkins work as
Kenyon College's National Endowment for the Humanities Professorship
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A Humanity-First approach to AI Digital Humanities
consistently attracts over 90% non-STEM majors
(Kenyon College Institutional Research)
Code, Products and Patents
- SentimentArcs: Github Repo
- GitHub: jon-chun
- SafeWeb: SEA Tsunami Products
- Patents: SEA Tsumani
![Trulli](images/fig_sentimentarcs_blocks.png)
Block Diagram for
SentimentArcs Notebooks
Kenyon AI Digital Humanities
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Top 10 Institutions reading our AI DH Research in 2022
digital.kenyon.edu/dh
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Leading Institutions reading our AI DH Research in 2022
digital.kenyon.edu/dh
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Eurasian Institutions
digital.kenyon.edu/dh
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Institutions from The Americas
digital.kenyon.edu/dh
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Countries Worldwide
digital.kenyon.edu/dh
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Institutions Worldwide (2023 May)
digital.kenyon.edu/dh
images\kenyon_dh_analytics_institutions_1958.png
Social Media
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@jonchun2000
Main Social Media Account
- Twitter: @jonchun2000
- LinkedIn: jonchun2000
- Instagram: jonchun2000
Mentored Research
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Brainstorming to translate new theories into testable models for (a) Literary Analysis, (b) Financial Forensics and (c) the Latent Space of Generative Art Prompts.
Integrated Program for Humane Studies (2017-)
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IPHS200 Programming Humanity (samples below)
- Cultural Bias/DALL-E 2: Adjectivally-Oriented: Women Through the Decades: Stylistic Shifts In Magazines As Represented By Image-Generating AI
- Political Science/Social Media How Did Sri Lankan Protestors End Up in the President’s Pool? Understanding the evolution of an occupy-style protest: A story of economic turmoil, declining social sentiment and resulting political change
- Gender Studies/Topic Modeling: The Second Meaning: Uncovering the Linguistic Interpretation of Simone de Beauvior’s The Second Sex
- Literature/Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: The Trials of Translation: A Cross-Linguistic Survey of Sentiment Analysis on Franz Kafka’s Trial
- ChatGPT/Security: Breaking ChatGPT with Dangerous Questions
- Art Communities/DALL-E 2: Do Andriods Dream of Digital Art? Addressing the Spectrum of Perspectives on AI-Generated Artwork
- Economics/Social Media Sentiment: How the Mighty Have Fallen: Analyzing Twitter Sentiment in the Wake of FTX Bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried's Indictment
- Literature/Spanish Sentiment Analysis: Multilingual Sentiment Analysis and Translation: Spanish and English Story Arcs in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo
- Sociology/Social Media: Understanding Caste System in Nepal: Surfacing changes in public sentiment on Twitter over time
- Political Science/Economics Military Expenditures and Terrorism: Assessing Correlation Between Terror Attacks and Global Military Spending
- Literature/Sentiment Analysis Hitchhiker's Guide to Sentiment Analysis: A Comparison between Movie and Film
- Sports Economics/Social Media: Values or Profit? An Analysis on the Impact of Legal Sports Betting on Sports Business
- Environmental Studies/Social Media Energy Conversation on Alternative Energy World Perspective vs Bangladesh
- Political Science/Social Media Understanding Public Opinion towards the Government of Bangladesh through Sentiment Analysis of Twitter
- Poetry/GPT-3: The GPT3 Re-Imagining of “Howl” By Allen Ginsberg: What Are The Strengths and Weaknesses of This Representation?
- Literature/GPT-2: 345M-GPT-2 After James Wright: Can AI Generate Convincing Contemporary Poetry?
- Environmental Studies/Bayesian Time Series Analysis: Predicting Attitudes Toward the Environment Artificial Intelligence for the Humanities
- Political Science/NLP Topic Modeling: Transitional Justice Terminology Analysis in United Nations General Assembly Speeches (1971-2015)
- Literature/NLP Sentiment Analysis Doubles and Reflections: Sentiment Analysis and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
- Conflict Studies/Data Science Cold War Conflicts: Analyzing the Role of U.S. Arms Exports
- Music/RNN Composition: RNN monophonic sheet music generation with LilyPond
- Political Science/Machine LearningFreedom, Democracy, and Well-Being: A Comparative Analysis of Global Progress Indexes Using K-Means Clustering
- Environmental Studies/Machine Learning LEED Certification Prediction with K-Means Clustering Algorithm
- Economics/Time Series Forecasting: Computational Approaches to Predicting Cryptocurrency Prices
- Film/NLG w/GPT-2: Digitizing Camp: Training a GPT-2 on "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"
- Journalism/NLG 2/GPT-2: GPT-2 Journalism: Can AI produce Mike Royko’s writing?
- Modern Language/NLP Analysis: Lost in Translation: Using Sentiment Analysis to Analyze Translations of Homer’s Odyssey
- Music/Machine Learning Recommendation: Analyzing popular music using Spotify’s Machine Learning Audio Features
- Political Science/Data Science: COVID-19: Global Trends in Social Protection, Unemployment, and Economic Stimuli
- Social Sciences/NLP: Building a Universal Human Trafficking Lexicon
- Law/NLP Topic Modeling: Topic Modeling Analysis of Supreme Court Opinions Focusing on Privacy Rights in the Context of Abortion Law
- Philosophy/NLG w/GPT-3 Prompt Engineering: Prompt Engineering Tips for Generating Text on Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind
- Political Science/Social Media NLP Sentiment Analysis: Consequences of Social Network Architecture: Analyzing Sentiment in Reddit Posts About Donald Trump
- Film/GPT-2: https://digital.kenyon.edu/dh_iphs_prog/19/
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IPHS290 Cultural Analytics (New Fall 2022)
- Upcoming Projects: (Intentionally vague for now)
- Multi-Racial Identity
- NLP Analysis of End-of-Life Medical Narratives
- US-Latin American Geopolitical, Economic, & Military Aid and Analysis
- Exploring Representations of Utopia in Literature over Time
- Analysis of Economic Performance and Healthcare Quality Metrics after Private Equity Acquisitions
- Global Supply Chain Analysis post-Covid
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IPHS300 AI for the Humanities (samples below)
- Jewish Studies/Information Science: Taxonomy Techniques for Holocaust-Related Image Digitization and Text
- Law: Synthetic Biology: Analyzing Trends in Intellectual Property Rights vs. Open Access to Research, 1989-2019
- Asian-American Studies/Sentiment Analysis: The Rise of Anti-Asian American Sentiment with COVID-19
- Gender Studies/Data Science: TikTok’s Non-Inclusive Beauty Algorithm & Why We Should Care
- Literature/NLP Stylometrics: Analyzing the Reading Levels of Fifty Shades of Grey and The DaVinci Code: Learning More About Blockbuster Books
- Conflict Studies/Data Science: Does U.S. Conflict Intervention Provoke Terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa?
- Mathematics/Cryptography: Homomorphic Encryption
- Political Science/Sentiment Analysis: Killed by Division: Sentiment Analysis Towards Juan Guaido by Venezuelan Opposition Factions Between 2019-2021
- Social Sciences/Data Science: Reframing the ways we understand Cancel Culture: Clickbait Campaigns in The Attention Economy
- Literature/NLP Sentiment Analysis: Five Books, Same Story: Understanding Percy Jackson through Sentiment Analysis
- Political Science/Data Science: 2020 Election Fraud: What Can Twitter Teach Us?
- Literature/NLP Sentiment Analysis: Jane AI-sten: What is Sentiment Analysis’s Connection to Best-Selling Literature?
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IPHS484 Senior Seminar/Research (samples below)
- Film/ChatGPT & DALL-E2: When AI Met Screenwriting... Can AI Generate Beat Sheets and Storyboards?
- Sociology/AI Visual Sentiment Analysis: AI reads Playboy (but not for the articles): Revealing Cover Trends with Deep Neural Networks
- Political Science/Econometrics: An Econometric Measure of the Post-9/11 Growth of the Defense Budget: Quantifying the Military-Industrial Complex’s Growing Influence Over the Pentagon
- Sociology/NLG with GPT-2 vs GPT-3: Black Box Karl Marx: What do large language models have to say about Das Kapital? A Comparison of GPT-2 and GPT-3 Outputs
- Fiction Narrative/NLP Sentiment Analysis: Adapted Arcs: Sentiment Analysis and The Sorcerer’s Stone
- Public Health/Statistical Machine Learning: Evaluating Ohio’s Opioid Overdose Epidemic with AI
- TV Script/NLP Sentiment Analysis: Blood in the Water: Storytelling and Sentiment Analysis in ABC's Shark Tank
- Social Media/NLG with GPT-2: GPT-2 Jomboy: Can AI produce exciting Baseball content?
- Art/Deep Neural Networks Generative Art: An Artist's Guide to AI Art
- Economics/Time Series Anomaly Detection: Analyzing Pump and Dump Schemes
Course Descriptions
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The virtuous cycle, feedback and tension between
the 3 models that guide our interdisciplinary innovation
Integrated Program for Humane Studies (2017-)
- IPHS200 Programming Humanity
- IPHS290 Cultural Analytics
- (New Fall 2022) Projects Upcoming
- IPHS300 AI for the Humanities (samples)
- IPHS494 Senior Seminar Research Projects
- IPHS Independent Study Research
Scientific Computing (2020-)
- SciComp Senior Seminar/Research
- Noisy Time Series Filtering, Smoothing and Feature Detection
- Narrative Metrics for NLG using LLM Transformers
- Diachronic Sentiment Analysis Central Bank Speeches using SentimentArcs
- SciComp Independent Study
- Industrial Revolution 4.0: End-to-End Industrial IoT Preventative Maintenance
Integrated Program for Humane Studies (2017-)
- IPHS200 Programming Humanity
- IPHS290 Cultural Analytics
- (New Fall 2022) Projects Upcoming
- IPHS300 AI for the Humanities (samples)
- IPHS494 Senior Seminar Research Projects
- IPHS Independent Study Research
Organizations
- The Helix Center, NY, NY
- Executive Committee (2022-)
- Round-Table: Living in Difficult Times, Nov 19, 2022
- About: The original inspiration for interdisciplinary forums arose from the observations by our director, Dr. Edward Nersessian, of the constraints in both communication and creativity among scientists at professional meetings, fueled both by narrow specialization and the grant process, that with its demand for sharply defined investigation seemed, in fact, to be limiting curiosity and inquiry. This motivated him to form discussion groups drawing on multiple disciplines, the creative productivity of which inspired the formation of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination.
- Mission: The primary mission of The Helix Center is to draw together leaders from distinct spheres of knowledge in the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology for interdisciplinary roundtables, the unique format of which potentiates new ideas, new questions, and facilitates emergent creative qualities of mind less possible in conventional collaborations. Such a drawing together of leaders of various disciplines irrespective of their academic affiliation allows the Helix Center to function as a kind of university without walls. In addition, through audience attendance and its Q&A engagement with the roundtable participants, and live streamed and archived events, we aim to expand public understanding and appreciation of the sciences and technology, the arts and humanities.
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Kenyon DHColab
(Kenyon AI Digital Humanities Colab)