Chris Thomas

Chris Thomas is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and core faculty at the Sanghani Center. His research interests lie at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. A primary focus of his research is to build robust AI systems that can understand and reason about real-world multimedia content (images, text, video, and audio) as humans do.

He represented Columbia University in the DARPA SemaFor program focused on disinformation detection and has also worked as part of other DARPA programs focused on multimedia understanding including AIDA and KAIROS. His work has appeared in top conferences and journals, including CVPR, ACL, NeurIPS, ECCV, IEEE PAMI, and IJCV.

Thomas has diverse interdisciplinary collaborations with faculty from other fields and institutions, including Columbia, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Pennsylvania.