Hello!

I’m Unso. I’m an Assistant Research Professor at Cornell Info Sci and Center for Data Science and Enterprise and Society.

At Cornell University, I teach a course on the History of AI in the Department of Information Science. This is a semi-technical course covering the philosophy of human-made things, the rise of defense spending on computers and automation, and private capital-led acceleration of consumer AI. I am currently writing a book based this course and the lectures will soon be available as a series of youtube videos!

My current research is broadly on enterprise applications of AI. This includes enterprise database accessibility, code generation such as SQL, and ecommerce & marketing data access and storage. I also work on various language and text data projects. Google scholar here.

Before Cornell, I used to work at Hugging Face as an AI engineer and worked on embedding models and multilingual search (2022-23). I also solo founded an AI startup Gena that focused on enterprise data access from relational databases with text-to-SQL systems. (2023-2025). Through Gena I raised 2 million dollars for my team and worked with companies like Samsung and KT for better enterprise access to relational data.

I went to grad school at Stanford where I wrote a History dissertation on machine learning and archival history and modern digitized historical records.

FAQ

How do you pronounce your name? OON-SO. I go by Unso or Eun Seo in writing.

Are you American? No, I was born and raised in South Korea. But I’ve lived in the U.S. for the majority of my adult-life and identify best with American culture. I’ve also lived in Singapore where I attended Australian and international schools.

Are you a historian? Yes! My most valuable contribution to the world is through history.

Work Experience

After my PhD and postdoc at Stanford HAI, I worked at Hugging Face as an AI engineer. I worked on embedding models and multilingual search with researchers like Nils Reimers, Douwe Kiela, and Meg Mitchell.

Shortly after, I founded my own AI startup Gena for which I raised money through private venture capital as well as federal grants. Gena was a company that worked on making APIs for enterprises for faster and more accurate database access through SQL generation. I managed 7 full time software engineers and our text2SQL ranked globally 1~10 on various benchmarks. I closed the company in 2025.

I started teaching history of AI as a lecture series at Seoul National University School of Law end of of 2023. I have since taught this course at Cornell Information Science Spring 2025 and Spring 2026.

Grants & Awards

As co-PI representing Cornell, I worked with a team at Harvard to receive a grant from Schmidt Sciences ($70,000 for Cornell) to work on AI search for low resource humanities text data.

During my Gena years I received a South Korean corporate R&D grant from TIPA to fund database accessibility research (~1.2 million USD)

Education

I received my PhD from the Stanford History Department with a dissertation thesis proposing a new approach to doing historical research in the era of digital abundance that I coined New Archival History. I demonstrate history’s transition to digital methods through an archival example of the Foreign Relations of the United States series. I was part of the inaugural cohort of the Stanford Data Science Institute.

My MS in Computer Science is also from Stanford where I focused on AI and I went to Brown University for college where I studied Economics and received a senior thesis award for best thesis in international history.