Thomas M. Blalock

2nd Lieutenant, US Air Force · Operations Research Analyst. MS Data Science candidate at UVA. Founder of Agent Service Index and Sidequest Local.

Now

Operations Research Analyst for the US Air Force while finishing an MS in Data Science at UVA on a Top-3 AAD scholarship. Building Agent Service Index — a discovery layer for the agent economy.

Ventures

May 2026 — present

Agent Service Index · Founder Live

The discovery layer for the agent economy.

agentserviceindex.com

  • Public registry where autonomous AI agents discover, authenticate to, and pay for services without API keys, dashboards, or human-in-the-loop signups.
  • Agents POST a natural-language query (e.g. "cloud hosting") and get back callable services. Onboarding is one prompt.
  • Live services: permissionless EC2 management, automated subdomain/CDN provisioning via Cloudflare Tunnel, and an x402 v2 facilitator for USDC payments on Base (EIP-3009).
  • Built on an MCP server architecture.
Dec 2025 — present

Sidequest Local · Founder Live

For when your friends are busy, but you're not.

sidequestlocal.com · Sidequest Local, Inc. · Charlottesville, VA

  • Mobile social discovery app for spontaneous local meetups: a real-time feed of what small groups near you are doing right now, with one-tap join.
  • Replaces the "text ten group chats, stay home" loop with a 30-second post and low-pressure participation.

Education

2025 — 2026

University of Virginia · MS Data Science

GPA 4.0 · AAD Top-3 Scholarship

2021 — 2025

US Air Force Academy · BS Computer Science, BS Data Science

Minor in High Performance Computing

  • Outstanding Cadet in Computer Science — graduated #1 of 39 in the CS class, selected wholistically by the department.
  • Overall GPA 3.967 (#9 of 938) · Computer Science 4.0 (#1 of 39) · Data Science 4.0 (#1 of 21).
2020 — 2021

New Mexico Military Institute · Associate of Science

GPA 4.0 · Valedictorian · Falcon Scholarship recipient

2018 — 2020

University of Central Oklahoma · Concurrent enrollment

GPA 4.0 · Taken during high school

Research

2024 — 2025

Flexible Input Networks · Individual

Air Force Research Laboratory · QC Ware Corp. · USAFA

  • Designed a novel class of neural architectures (FINs) that handle dynamically-sized "set of sets" inputs without pre-decoder aggregation, recurrence, or autoregression.
  • Built the first reinforcement-learning solution to the AFRL Airlift Logistics Challenge, outputting a dynamic number of actions in one pass.
  • Awarded the #1 USAFA Computer Science Research Project of Summer 2024. Presented at CORONA 2024 to the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force.
  • github.com/ThomasBlalock/FINs_Airlift_Challenge
May — Aug 2023

Informed Machine Learning · Team of 4

NSA Mathematics Research Group · USAFA

  • Built an attention-based autoencoder "informed" by an expert-curated ontology, integrating it into a pre-trained LLM's encoder to reduce hallucination on scientifically nuanced text.
  • The informed encoder beat the baseline on semantic extraction — evidence that architectural priors can move accuracy more efficiently than scaling.
  • Awarded the #1 USAFA Junior Engineering Research Project of Summer 2023. Presented to the Director of the NSA and at CORONA 2023.
2022 — 2023

NATO Alliance Space Deterrence · Led 29-person team

USAFA · NATO Science & Technology Organization

  • Led a 29-cadet team developing a space-deterrence framework (diplomatic, informational, military, economic) for NATO delegates after Russia's 2021 kinetic ASAT test.
  • Briefed NATO's inaugural space deterrence wargame in Paris (13 member nations represented).
  • Presented at the Western Regional Honors Conference and the USSPACECOM Space Law Conference.

Projects

2024 — 2025

Automated Conversational Hijacking · Team of 3

USAFA Center for Cyberspace Research

  • Proof-of-concept agentic malware that infiltrates an email account and sends spear-phishing messages on pre-existing threads — an LLM writes in the victim's voice from real context.
  • A demonstration of where the social-engineering threat surface is going now that agents can read context and write convincingly.
2023 — 2024

Brain-Computer Interface P300 Speller · Individual

USAFA Center for Cyberspace Research

  • Full-pipeline EEG-based brain-computer interface for typing using brain activity alone. Built the helmet hardware, the P300 stimulus GUI, the data pipeline, and a recurrent CNN classifier.
  • Primary use case: communication for people with severe motor disabilities.
  • github.com/ThomasBlalock/P300_BCI_Speller
Jan — Mar 2024

Autonomous Rover · Individual

USAFA Center for Cyberspace Research

  • Computer-vision rover trained first with behavioral cloning, then with an actor-critic RL setup and heavy reward engineering.
  • Won a competitive race against other cadet teams on an unknown track.
  • github.com/ThomasBlalock/Autonomous_Rover
Mar — May 2023

Facial Recognition Similarity Query · Team of 4

USAFA · Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

  • Similarity-query system that, given one reference image, retrieves every photo of a specific person from a 40,000+ image database.
  • Vector-database search plus a transfer-learned CNN fine-tuned with a triplet loss. Research-only.
  • github.com/ThomasBlalock/Image_Guyver__Facial_Recognition

Leadership

Squadron Commander 2025

Commanded a 110-cadet unit across all USAFA cadet wing operations and mission sets.

Wing Academics NCOIC 2023

Managed a staff of ~130 administering academics for 4,000+ cadets.

Cadet Space Ops Sq Executive 2022 — 2023

Led a 14-cadet instructor team teaching space operations to ~35 students.

USAFA Data Competition Team 2022 — 2023

Founded and led the team (8 members) as Cadet in Charge.

Wall Street Warfighters 2022 — 2023

Founded the personal finance club; grew it into the largest club at USAFA.

Science of Learning — Outreach Director 2022 — 2023

Led an 8-cadet team producing educational content for 4,000+ cadets.

Alpha Troop Commander 2021

Commanded a 107-cadet unit through a 24/7 schedule.

Founder — Blalock Enterprises, LLC 2020

Custom design-to-print online merchandise LLC. 126% return on equity in one year.

Awards

Outstanding Cadet in Computer Science

USAFA · 2025

#1 of 39 in the USAFA Computer Science graduating class, selected wholistically by the department.

Advanced Academic Degree (Top 3)

Air Force · 2025

Competitive scholarship funding an MS in Data Science at UVA and a follow-on slot.

#1 USAFA CS Research Project of Summer 2024

USAFA Engineering Division · 2024

Awarded for Flexible Input Networks — the neural-architecture work built with AFRL and QC Ware.

Engineering Division Junior CSRP Award

USAFA · 2023

#1 of ~70 research projects in the engineering division's Cadet Summer Research Program. Awarded for the NSA Informed Machine Learning work.

Barry Goldwater Scholarship Finalist

Goldwater Foundation · 2024

Won the Air Force Academy's nomination for the national Goldwater Scholarship.

Wing Fourth Class Cadet Competition Award

USAFA · Fall 2021

#1 USAFA freshman of 1,078, selected wholistically for leadership, initiative, and embodiment of USAFA ideals.

Group 2 Cadet of the Month

USAFA · August 2022

Monthly leadership award; one cadet per class year out of ~1,100 in Group 2.

Best Exemplifies the Space Force Core Values

USAFA / Azimuth · June 2022

Awarded to the rising 3rd-class cadet who best exemplified character, connection, commitment, and courage.

Valedictorian

New Mexico Military Institute · 2021

Junior college valedictorian; graduated with a 4.0 GPA.

Falcon Scholarship

Falcon Foundation · 2020

Merit scholarship sponsoring a year of preparatory study before USAFA matriculation.

Skills & Domains

Skills sections are silly. Any good computer scientist can figure out whatever skill is needed to get the job done.

A PDF version exists but lags this page — print this page (US Letter) for the current one.