Lois Wong

AI Librarian, University of Chicago

I’ve had a longstanding obsession with silence—specifically, the idea of silence as a signifier and absence as a parsable signal. In Prince and Smolensky’s Optimality Theory, it is the non-words that reveal the underlying structure of a language. Debussy defines music as the silence between the notes; Cage shows how silence is compositional. Woolf cites unwritten books and Du Bois posits the “eloquent omissions and silences” in sorrow songs as articulations of pain and tragedy.

My work in AI and model evaluation is one instantiation of this obsession. I'm interested in how archival silence and unrepresentative training data surface as algorithmic bias and model error. Practically speaking, I'm experimenting with black-box methods to identify knowledge gaps from a model's outputs and exploring targeted remediation to close them. LMs learn from corpora that disproportionately preserve the profiles and perspectives of those historically afforded an education and platform while underrepresenting others due to factors like data quality and uneven digitization. These absences are not only historical; they are ongoing. People are still missing and being silenced, and building methods to find them is ultimately where I want to take my work.

I have a BA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley and an MSE in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, where my research focused on information retrieval, recommender systems, and NLP. Working across big tech, startups, nonprofits, and academia has given me a strong sense of how novel technologies are developed, adopted, and governed across different contexts and priorities. Refer to my LinkedIn profile to learn more about my work as the first AI Librarian at the University of Chicago.

Projects

Symposium - Interdisciplinary Approaches to AI and Model Evaluation

Models long predate AI as a means of sense-making. Every field builds and evaluates them differently. This symposium puts those standards side by side and asks what they mean for evaluating AI systems that make decisions about people. Call for proposals to come. Proceedings will be published in UChicago's institutional repository.

Partner: SJSU AI Center for Civic and Social Good.

20 April 2027 | Regenstein 122, University of Chicago

Community of Practice

Noticing how many institutions are independently solving the same AI adoption and implementation challenges, I co-founded a cross-institutional community of practice with Sharesly Rodriguez (San José State University) and Will Huggins (Stanford). We develop openly licensed resources and infrastructure for collaboration to reduce duplicated effort and increase collective impact.

Gaita: A RAG System for Personalized Computer Science Education

Gaita is a conversational RAG system that generates personalized Computer Science learning pathways from open-access courseware. Inspired by my own transition into tech, Gaita makes CS education accessible to learners from non-technical and non-traditional backgrounds.

Essays

The Silent Account of American History

On how omission, lost names, and unsung songs constitute their own account of American identity.

What it Means to be an Artist — and Why I Study Computer Science

Refer to the endnotes to see the theories and theorists that motivated me to pivot into CS.

Optimality Theory, A Room of One's Own, and Education as a Panacea for Pain

Another "proof" of the silence thread citing theories and terminology from Linguistics (phonetics and phonology) and Literary Criticism.

My Personal Statement of Purpose

The PhD statement that got rejected everywhere that I still stand by (mostly). I followed the education thread but it wasn't quite the answer I was looking for. The original thread was always on silence and we shall see where that goes.

Everything is Worthwhile—Grounding in Classical NLP

During my undergraduate career, I fell madly in love with logic and all things formal. This is, unironically, how I made sense of the uncertainy, delayed validation, and lack of visible output during my transition into CS.

Mere Exposure, Affinity, and Homecoming: ∃x in Classical Music

On music theory, familiarity, beauty, and homecoming. Read until the end to see a funny meme I created.

View my full list of essays here.

Selected Talks & Workshops

Upcoming Talks

ACRL 2027: Comparing Notes: Initial Impacts and Future Directions from AI Roles in the Library

9 April 2027 8:30a | Conference Presenter, with Sharesly Rodriguez

Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon

Past Talks

Implementing an AI Evaluation Framework

IPLC Discovery Days Conference

October 2026 | Speaker/Panelist with David Bietila

Introduction to AI: A Foundations Seminar; Beyond the Basics: Taking Your AI Knowledge Further

An evening of two seminars for UChicago alumni, parents, and friends. The first covers what language models are, why they hallucinate, and how error differs from bias. The second argues what an AI system surfaces, ranks, and omits is not neutral, drawing on information retrieval, recommender systems, and survivorship bias.

September 2026 | Speaker

Guildhall, London, United Kingdom

Slides