How do you say your name? Unso is pronounced OON-SO. But I also accept more creative approaches!  
Are you American? No. I'm South Korean, but I spent the majority of my adult life in California. I also grew up in Singapore where I attended Australian and British-international schools.
Are you a historian? Yes! I believe my most valuable contribution to the world is through writing history.
As a historian, do you think AI will replace us all? Historically, this question has been asked for centuries. Hm, probably somewhat but not entirely...

I am driven by the questions: What are the mechanisms that drive technological breakthroughs? How can we best facilitate AI research and deployment such that longtail and low resource data and models can participate?

My current interests are in multilingual and historical NLP and data/database accessibility. You can check out my Google Scholar for updates. My current big projects are the Ithaca benchmark --the first composite benchmark for classical humanities data, Southeast Asian historical manuscript data, and SQL generation projects. I love to work with students and mentors with diverse backgrounds!
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At Cornell I have been teaching INFO6940: Global History of AI. This is a graduate course on the long history of humanity's fascination with automation and human made intelligence and natural behavior. Course materials are available at aihistoryclass.com.

My focus of 2026/7 is to turn this into a book.

This summer I am also co-editing the Special Issue on AI & Archives part of the Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society, which is being released digitally piecemeal through 2026.

In 2026, I started working on Project Clover - a non-profit alternative to Hugging Face for dataset and model publishing.  

2026 Cornell AI & Society Seed Grant I led this proposal for Project Clover alongside Cornell librarians Greg Green, Emily Zinger and Historian Tamara Loos for a 65,000 USD tier 2 award
2025 Schmidt Sciences Foundation (HAVI) As part of a team led by Harvard researchers Peter Bol, I was awarded a subaward of 70,000 USD as PI representing Cornell
2024 TIPA South Korean R&D Grant During my Gena years, I was PI for a ~1.2m USD grant for research in database accessiblity for enterprise applications

After grad school and a brief postdoc at Stanford HAI, I left academia to work as an AI engineer in industry. I worked at various tech companies including Hugging Face. My mentors there were Nils Reimers, Meg Mitchell, and Douwe Kiela. I focused on embedding model methods including SetFit and multilingual search. I also helped integrate the Sentence Transfomers module and launch the datasets library.

From summer 2023 to end of 2025, I solo founded and operated an AI startup called Gena. I raised about 2m USD to research and implement database and data accessibility layers for companies such as Samsung and smaller ecommerce companies on Shopify.   

Before Cornell, I taught History of AI and AI Policy at Seoul National University, School of Law in Fall 2023.

I went to grad school at Stanford where I studied History (PhD) and Computer Science (MS). My advisors Gavin Wright (Economics) and Zephyr Frank (History) supervised my thesis on New Archival History, a proposal for computational methods for large scale historical source analysis. I was part of the inaugural cohort of the Stanford Data Science Institute and member of the Center for Spatial Textual Analysis.

At Brown, I studied Economics. My senior thesis on the Vietnam War won the Samuel Lamport Prize for International Understanding.