Chris Thomas

Chris Thomas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. His research focuses on computer vision, cross-modal retrieval, and multimodal knowledge representation, with applications in information extraction, fake news detection, and AI safety. He leads the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics and has received grants from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and a Google Research Scholar award.

Education: Ph.D. (2020) and B.S. (2013) in Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh.

Research Interests: Developing robust cross-modal systems that bridge vision and language. Key areas include fine-grained visual entailment, multimodal inconsistency detection, and defending AI models against adversarial attacks. His work emphasizes practical applications like fact-checking and cybersecurity.

Recent Contributions: Led the development of JourneyBench (a vision-language benchmark) and the Semantic Shield defense framework. Recent grants include cybersecurity for embodied agents and safer multimodal web agents.

Awards: Google Research Scholar Award (2025), multiple Commonwealth Cyber Initiative grants (2024–2025).

Advising & Grants: Advises students like Hani Alomari (ACL 2025) and collaborates with institutions like Columbia University and UCLA. His work integrates multimodal data to address real-world challenges in AI safety and information integrity.

Labs/Teams: Active in Virginia Tech’s AI initiatives, focusing on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of vision, language, and security.