Unsojo

Hi! I'm Unso.
‍I'm a historian at Cornell in the Department of Information Science, Bowers CIS. I teach history of AI and like to research anything at the intersection of data and people.

I am currently working on open-accessing all of my history of AI course material in book format and as a series of Youtube videos. More information to follow.

FAQ

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 thru 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...

Research & Teaching

I like to research anything at the intersection of data and people. My current interests are in multilingual NLP and data/database accessibility. You can check out my Google Scholar for updates. My big projects now are on historical data and LLMs, SQL generation, and code generation models. I love to work with students and mentors with diverse backgrounds!
‍
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.

Grants & Awards

2025 Schmidt Sciences Foundation (HAVI) As part of a team led by Harvard researchers Peter Bol, Kwok-Leong Tang, and Kianté Brantley, I was awarded 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

Work Experience

After grad school and a brief postdoc at Stanford HAI, I left academia to work at 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.

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.

Education

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.