Thomas M. Blalock

University of Virginia · MS Data Science

GPA 4.0 · AAD Top-3 Scholarship

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).

New Mexico Military Institute · Associate of Science

GPA 4.0 · Valedictorian · Falcon Scholarship recipient

University of Central Oklahoma · Concurrent enrollment

GPA 4.0 · Taken during high school

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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